Lost Stars (13 page)

I said, “I'm out,” but they didn't hear me, so fast and hard and furious were they playing. It was perfect, really, because I could just stare at Dean, his sinewy triceps pulsing with the thump of the drums.

Dean and I didn't talk much after we were done playing, but occasionally he'd look up from across the room and half nod my way, or half smile my way, baby steps of interaction in the group. He kept talking to Tommy and Greta after Tiger left to get more beer. I waited for some entry, some way to part the Red Sea between me and them. I tried to will his eyes to look my way, his body to stand and retrieve me. Tried to call up the courage from inside me to move toward him, away from the magnetic pull of the records.

Then suddenly he was there before me.

“Um, hey,” he said. “I'm gonna have a smoke. You want one?”

“I don't smoke,” I said, which was the wrong answer and also not true.

“You want to come inhale my secondhand smoke?”

“Best offer I've had all day,” I said.

And then we retreated to the back of the room, alone-ish, though Tommy seemed to be eyeing us with a menacing stare. Dean had Tiger's guitar, and he was strumming it, and I was pretending to be comfortable.

“I saw Billy Bragg in concert last year, and his guitar is totally amazing—​this green Burns Steer that's all beat up, but it sounds so good. Like, so bright.”

“Yeah, I love the sound of his guitar,” I said.

“It's just like Willie Nelson's—​you don't need one of these perfect Martins. It can be totally beat up and sound amazing.”

“You like Willie Nelson?” I tried not to sound too disapproving, but this was a little outside my musical comfort zone.

“It's impossible not to like Willie Nelson.” He started to strum some song I'd never heard before.

“It is?”

“Yes,” he said this as if it were obvious.

I started singing “To All the Girls I've Loved Before,” which was up there on the Songs with Worst Lyrics list.

“I didn't say you had to love every song.” We passed a cigarette back and forth, that satisfying feeling of fiberglass burning in my throat. Why did I like that?

“Hey, do you have any happy secrets?” I asked him, taking a deep drag of the cigarette.

“Like what?”

“Like something that is not some terrible thing about yourself but that you still don't want anyone to know.” I handed the cigarette back to him.

“So . . . it's a secret, so you don't want anyone to know it, but it's a good thing?”

“Yes, exactly.”

He squinted his eyes. “Can you give me an example of this?”

“Oh, I have to go first?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. Okay. Well. Is my obsessively tracking a comet not good enough?”

“Nope. I already know about that one.”

“Okay,” I sighed. “Here's the happy secret: I'm also working on a bunch of songs inspired by astronomy.”

“Play me one.”

“No.”

“Yes,” he said, leaning over so close to me that I could smell his deodorant and the actual smell of human sweat beneath it.

“Hand me the guitar,” I said, and he did. “Just so you know: this is going to be really dumb.”

“Okay, great. Thanks for the warning.”

What could possibly be more saccharine and embarrassing than a song about the stars, but I sang one about white dwarfs because, in my humble opinion, it didn't suck.
I see you, and you're not even here. Long after you're gone, your light appears.
“No one would think that was dumb,” he said when I was done.

“Okay, I never want to talk about that again in my life. What's your happy secret?”

“Man, I don't know if I can top that. Okay, here's one,” he said, shifting to face me. “This is much weirder than yours. I really love to brush my teeth.”

“Hmm. That's good, I guess. From a dentist's perspective.” And from the perspective of whoever might be kissing him.

“Yeah, sometimes I just get super into it and brush my teeth for, like, ten minutes.”

“Is that a happy secret? Bleeding gums?”

“Eh, kind of,” he said. “It's a lot happier than a lot of other secrets I have.”

I smiled at him, just so he'd learn, eventually, that all his secrets were safe with me.

“Also, as you know, I have a weird thing about Shakespeare.”

“Not that weird.”

He took the guitar back from me and started to sing Shakespeare, apparently:
Though this be madness, yet there is method in it.
Whatever that meant. Then he started to play a song that I instantly recognized: “Carrie.” My dad used to play it for me back when he was a nice person.
Carrie, Carrie, maybe we'll meet again.
“You know that is one of the worst songs in history, right? It's right up there with ‘We Built This City.'”

“Yes, thank you, I do know that. What happened to Jefferson Starship, anyway? Or Starship, as they're apparently now called. They were so good when they were Jefferson Airplane.”

So then we were just sitting there and it was the worst and best thing in the whole world, but I could see the clock inching toward eleven and everyone was in the room with us anyway and this boy had been put on Earth to torture me. Then the basement door creaked open and Soo's mother appeared above us, silhouetted in the basement doorway, holding the cordless phone in her hand. Soo's mom seemed so wobbly up there.

“Greta,” she called down, “it's your dad.”

Greta's face crumbled. “On the phone?”

“He needs you to come home.”

She reddened as she went up the stairs and grabbed the phone from Soo's mom, turning so we couldn't see or hear what she said. Then, her face cloudy, she handed the phone back and walked back down the stairs to grab her purse.

“I have to go,” she said to us. “Shit. Tiger isn't here.”

“We'll drive you,” Dean said. We? He looked at me. “Right, Carrie?”

Oh. We. “Of course,” I said.

“It's okay—​I'll walk.” I figured she didn't want us to see the grandeur of her palatial house. She lived on North Broadway, in one of those lovely Victorians with the turrets and fifteen complementary colors of paint. I had to admit I was kind of curious. Also: I was going to be in the car with Dean, which was pretty much the most exciting thing in my life besides waiting for the comet.

Greta seemed pretty messed up—​drunk and high. I had probably never noticed, since I was usually so drunk and high myself, but it looked kind of awful: makeup smeared, the perfection of her hippie-druggie cheerleader softened and slanted. It summoned something in me I couldn't ever have imagined I'd feel for Greta: pity. Just a little bit.

“No,” I said. “Let us drive you.”

Even as I felt sad for Greta, or worried—​I had no idea what was wrong with her dad—​something else skyrocketed through me.
Us.

Greta was quiet in the back seat. Dean put on the Velvet Underground, and I stared out the window and felt the warm breeze on my face. There it was again: “I'll Be Your Mirror.” I looked at Dean, but he stared intently out the window as a mist descended, his windshield wipers doing little more than smearing it across the glass.
Please put down your hands, 'cause I see you.

The only thing Greta said was, “It's the one on the right,” as we neared a big house. Yes, it had a turret. But the paint was peeling—​dull brick red, not at all like so many of the other fixed-up houses on the street. And a bunch of fire escapes were grafted onto the side of it, the telltale sign that it had been cut up into apartments.

“Thanks,” she said quietly as she let herself out of the car. I'd never seen her like this: dejected, that beautiful smile wiped off her face.

“I'm going in with you,” I said, opening the door, placing a hand on my back where it creaked.

“No—​don't.”

But I didn't listen to her. Dean waited in the car, and I walked with Greta to a scratched-up open door along the bottom of the house, the basement, into a tiny apartment with brown carpeting and a foldout couch on which her father was lying, moaning, clutching his side. He had thrown up, and his breath was short. This was her father? This was where Greta lived? This was how she lived?

She put her hand on his shoulder. “Dad, can you hear me? Dad? Did you take your medication today?” It seemed like his mouth was too dry to speak.

“What's the matter with him?” I asked.

“This is what happens before he goes into a diabetic coma.” She opened a kitchen drawer and took out a syringe and a vial. “You should go,” she said, loading up the syringe.

“I can stay,” I said.

“No. I've got this. I've done it thousands of times.” She inserted the needle into the crook of her dad's arm and he began to quiet down. It seemed like Greta did not want to look me in the eye. “He doesn't take care of himself,” she said. “That's probably why my mom left him. He does this sometimes until I have to take care of him.”

“I can stay,” I said again. I didn't know how to help her, but I so wanted to.

Finally she turned to me and kissed me on the cheek. “I'm happy for you.” She squeezed my hand and she gave me the gift of her smile and I could tell it was genuine and she really was happy for me because I liked a boy and maybe, maybe, maybe he liked me too. A really good boy. Not a gross drunken mean boy, not a random boy or a stranger or someone who would never talk to me again. Then she said, “I love you,” and all of a sudden, my eyes filled with tears. Tears for her and for me.

Back in the car, Dean asked, “Is everything okay?”

I thought of Greta standing there over her dad, the stink and the sorry sight of him. Greta, poor Greta—​she was the last person in the world I'd thought I'd ever feel sorry or sad for, and yet now I did, a streak of it shooting through me. Sad and sorry and then this weird wash of gratitude. My own dad gave up drinking two years ago now, and he didn't have some chronic disease that he made me tend to. No matter what I could say about my dad, at least he wasn't sick or drunk. I'd never thought to describe my parental situation as lucky before.

“Yeah,” I said. “Everything is kind of okay.” We headed back toward Soo's, and I leaned my head against the window. No sign of the comet, no bright streak of light across the sky, but I did see one small meteor sashay across the night, and it took away the sting of what I'd just seen. Greta's life was so different from what I'd imagined. In many ways, it was more like mine. Maybe worse.

“I have a question,” I said.

“You're in luck.”

“How come you were up at five in the morning when I came home that day, the first day I saw you?”

“Oh. Well, I have this thing where I like to stay up until dawn. It just makes me feel better.” He turned right onto Thames Street, the street where I'd smoked my first joint and found a litter of stray kittens and spent an hour crying and then pretended that I'd had a great time.

“Really? Daylight? I like it better when the stars come out and I'm reminded that we're suctioned to this ball of oxygen and silicon and magnesium because of the strange and amazing force of gravity but that there's a whole universe out there.”

He laughed. “Yes, that's good too. But you'd be surprised how good you feel when the stars start to fade and the light comes out.” He didn't turn on any music. “So, I have a question,” he said.

“You are also in luck.” I put my feet up on the dashboard.

“Where is your mom?”

“Oh.” I put my feet down again. Not the question I was expecting. “Well, she's in the Catskills somewhere. At some retreat thing for hippie fuckups or something.” Which sort of sounded like my boot camp, but with tofu and yoga.

“Really?”

“Really.”

“Doesn't your dad mind?” I watched Dean's hands shift the gears. It just seemed like such a grown-up thing, and it made me feel so young.

I shrugged my shoulders. “I never asked him.” It wasn't entirely true.
Where's Mom and when is she coming back?
had been a pretty much endless refrain for the first week, but each week after, Rosie and I had asked less and less. We had lost 40 percent of the residents of our household within two years, and everything was so strange that in some way we got used to the strangeness. The strangeness became normalcy. And we stopped asking.

“That sucks.”

“Um, yeah.”

“Grownups,” he said. “They're the worst.”

“Except for Soo's mom.”

“She's all right. But I don't think you'd want her for a mom.”

“Why not? Soo gets to do whatever she wants.”

“I don't know. I think a strict parent who's sober during the daytime is better than a mom who's wasted by noon and lets you do whatever you want.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

Greta's dad was sick, and Soo's mom was drunk, and my mom was gone, and my dad was mean—​it was all some variation on a theme.

We turned onto Soo's street, but I put my hand on Dean's arm as he downshifted. It was so warm and there was that soft hair and a few freckles dotting his skin, and even though I didn't want to do it, I said, “I think I have to go home.”

Dean brought me back to my bike, and I rode it home as the mist got thicker, giving way to a gentle rain. I couldn't shake that image of Greta rolling her moaning dad onto his back, or the sight of that dirty brown carpet in their dingy apartment.

I opened the door to my house slowly. He was sitting in his chair in the dark, like some sad figure from a Dickens novel.

“It's midnight,” he said. “It's actually twelve-oh-three.”

“I know. I'm sorry. I was just—”

“You were not at Soo's. I called her mom.”