Lost Stars (16 page)

“They're not.” Somehow I was whispering. “They're good people.”

“You guys think you're so cool, with your drugs and that stupid band. That band is really terrible. You know that. I know you know that, Carrie.” She paused. “You know those people are not your real friends, right? They only have you around because they feel guilty. Everybody knows that.”

“What are you talking about? You think you did anything when Ginny died? You think you showed up at the house and took care of me? No, you didn't. Nobody in our whole school did anything except Soo and Greta and Ginny's friends. They were the only ones who cared that she died.”

“That's not true,” Tonya said quietly, but I could see that she, too, had regret pooling around her. “I'm sorry. I didn't know what to say. And it seemed like from that moment on, you had decided to be just like her. Mini Ginny.” I didn't look at her. “We used to be friends,” she said.

Was that supposed to be an apology? An explanation?

“Now we're not,” I said. It was just a fact, as plain as Ginny's death, as her body burned into ash. Both of us standing, Tonya with a shovel, me with her hammer, staring at each other like Old West fellas in a duel.

“What seems to be the problem here?” asked Lynn.

“There's no problem,” I said in my brightest voice, picking up my own park-issued collection of wood screws—​which was always far heavier than I expected—​and rifling through it in a vague attempt to mimic actual work. I put a few on top of my notebook and pretended to sort through them.

“She hasn't done a single thing all morning,” Tonya said.

“Screw you, Tonya. I'm wearing a bungee cord. How hard can I work?”

“Caraway—​Caraway.” Lynn held his hand out toward my chest, even though I hadn't moved, hadn't lunged at Tonya the way I'd wanted to. See? I was getting better. “No one is accusing you of anything, but it's true that I have seen you standing here for the last hour while the rest of us—”

“This is bullshit,” I said, now collecting the energy to be angry.

“Please don't use that kind of language here, Caraway—”

It was as if I'd made the decision, but also as if I hadn't. Some part of me said,
Screw it. Let's ruin this.
Two paths, and I took the one most traveled, in which I destroyed all that was good.

“I will use whatever language I want to use!” I shouted, throwing my notebook down on the ground, all those weeks of calculations and pages of lyrics subsumed by dirt. “Language has no inherent meaning, and if you think the word
bullshit
is a bad word, that's your problem. It's just four letters strung together to make a sound, okay? You think woolly mammoths got offended when someone made the wrong sound?”

Lynn stopped trying to calm me down or talk to me. Instead, he took a deep breath and dropped his head to his chest and whispered.

“Oh my god, are you praying?”

I wanted to escape so badly, but now all the kids had stopped their toiling and were standing there watching me, watching Lynn with his hand still raised, like Diana Ross in “Stop in the Name of Love,” his head bent and his mouth making those delicate wisps of sound.

“I can't take this shit,” I said, and a force just started pushing me. It pushed me to throw my hardhat into the ditch below Tonya's footbridge, and it pushed me to pull wildly on my hiking boot and to fall while I was doing it, mud all along the right side of my crappy, enormous Wrangler jeans, and then to finally free my foot from the boot and to give up on the other, grunting all the while, and stomp off with one muddy-socked foot and the other one still imprisoned in the boot, hobbling, the mud making slurpy sucking sounds as it tried to snag my feet, tried to hold me back. But no. Nothing could hold me back. Not the fading sounds of Lynn's protests, the hoots and hollers of the other kids, or Tonya calling, “Yes, I do think woolly mammoths would be offended if one of them made the wrong sound. And
bullshit
has eight letters.”

I kept trudging, knowing that all of them were watching my limping, muddy figure disappear, swallowed by the dark canopy of evergreens.

I walked for what seemed like days, though was probably only, like, thirty minutes, muddy and one-shoed and muttering all the things I should have said, all the snappy and sharp-tongued comebacks I should have called forth to defend my honor. Occasionally my internal ranting was interrupted by crying. This was it, the thing where I couldn't calm down, where I could only volley back and forth between rage and despair.

And then, from across the field, I saw them. My compatriots stood in a circle, gathering around and laughing, and I thought I even saw a Hacky Sack bobbing in the center; nothing like a common enemy—​me—​to bring the group together. A sea of weeds between us, and nobody wanted me to cross it.

“Caraway?” Lynn called, spying me from beyond. Maybe not nobody. “Come join us, please.” For some reason, I came.

I stood outside the circle that had coalesced around one white pine with a few needle-less branches reaching toward the sky. Ginny's tree stood less than fifty feet away, across the street, that white cross staring at me from the bark.

“So, we're trying to find out if this tree is healthy enough to keep standing,” the man was saying.

“What are
you
doing here?” I asked.

Pablo smiled. “Carrie. Nice to see you. How are you?”

I stayed on the edge of the circle. “I'm a wreck,” I said, blowing my nose on my sleeve. “Why are you here?” I repeated. Every single kid, plus Lynn, was staring at me.

“I helped found the program, to help young people develop an interest in science careers. I'm the one who told your dad about it.”

“Caraway,” Lynn said, still trying powerfully to smile. I had to give it to the guy—​he had a deep reserve of positivity on which to draw. “Caraway?”

“What?” I snapped. “Will you please stop calling me that?”

Lynn nodded and asked me very quietly, “Are you okay?”

I looked at Pablo and the white cross and the dying trees and the smiling supervisor and the nice kids my own age. “Is that a real question? Because if it is, I'm pretty sure you can answer it.”

Lynn took me by the shoulder and led me away from the group to sit beneath a tree. To sit beneath that tree. To sit beneath the tree.

“So, Caraway,” Lynn said, taking my notebook out of my backpack, which he'd carried with him from the site.

I froze, thinking he'd found the parts where I'd written about his disparagement of gay people or my critique of his John Lennon glasses (no uncool person should ever don such spectacles; it's like playing “Imagine” as elevator music), but he'd opened it to the page where I'd written
I'm so sick of myself, I want to be someone else. I'm so sick of all this sky, I just want to die.

“I need to talk to you about what you've written in your notebook.”

“They're lyrics,” I said.

He didn't blink, didn't betray any kind of emotion. “I know there have been incidents.”

“Why? How do you know? Did she get to you, too?” The blood rose to my cheeks. “What do you know?”

“A lot,” he said.

“You know about my trips to Disney World?”

“Is Disney World the psychiatric emergency room?”

“Yes.”

He said, very quietly, “Then, yes, I know.”

“How?” I asked. “How do you know?”

He had those big hands pressed together in front of him, a prayer laid down on that patch of grass. “I know because I was looking for a babysitter for my kids that summer, and the Tellers had given me your number, and before I called, they had found out about the struggles you were having. So they told me.”

“You don't
have
a struggle,” I said. “Maybe you engage in a struggle. Maybe you just struggle.”

“Okay. They let me know that you were struggling. Is that better?”

“No,” I said. “This is not better. I'm not the one with the problems. My dad has a problem. Tonya has a problem. Friggin' Pablo the arborist has problems!” I was yelling again, a sharp sound that surely could reach the group.

Lynn stayed the picture of calm, his gaze steady upon me, exposing me and comforting me at the same time.

“Listen, I have sworn off anything to do with therapists, so if you're planning to perform any psychology voodoo on me, you can forget about it. You don't know what's wrong with me.”

His gaze stayed steady as ever, and there was so much kindness and understanding in it that I couldn't stand it. I grabbed my notebook and made to leave.

“Listen, Caraway. Your mom leaving you like that—​that's the kind of thing you just can't do. She can't just do that. I want you to know that—​it's against all the laws of nature. It's—​it's okay to be devastated by that.”

“I'm not devastated.”

“Okay. But I want you to know that the amount of loss you've endured—​it could knock down even the strongest of individuals. It doesn't mean that it's okay for you to talk to me like that. It doesn't mean that it's okay to not do your work, or to be unkind and ungenerous. It just means that you've been given a truly raw deal, and I'd be mad about it too if that happened to me. I, for one, would be devastated.”

I couldn't catch my breath to say anything more. All I could do was leave.

I stood outside Reinventing the Wheel, my bike leaning against me. I had changed back into my cutoffs and put my mother's flannel on, but I was still muddy and one-shoed. When Dean walked out, I waved to him, forgetting for a minute that I looked like a homeless person, and then, when I realized it, not really caring anymore.

He walked over. “Um, wow,” he said. “They're really working you hard.”

It was the first time I'd really smiled all day.

“Hey, Dean? I have a question.”

“You're in luck.”

“Can you take me somewhere?

“Um, yeah,” he said. “Where do you want to go?”

I swallowed. “To my mom's.”

“Yeah, but . . .”

I waited for him to say he couldn't, waited for him to wriggle out of being with me. Instead he pointed to his own bike-grease-stained clothes. “Maybe we should change first?”

I was afraid to go home. He seemed to understand this without me explaining it and pulled into Mrs. Richmond's driveway.

I had never been directly on her property. It was lushly landscaped, a little fountain gurgling in a rose garden.

“It's nice over here,” I said, more ashamed than ever of our low-rent yard, or lack thereof.

“Yeah, right?” he said. “So, make yourself at home. I'm going to take a shower. You can take one after if you want.”

“Are you trying to tell me that this is not a good look for me?” I waved my hands before my mud-caked outfit.

“Nah. It's still a good look.” My face got hot.

He went upstairs, and I stood for a minute against Mrs. Richmond's cool marble counters. She had art on the walls—​abstract paintings with bold colors melting into one another—​but few family photos. She and her late husband had never had kids. My mother used to say so with pity in her voice, but now I figured Mrs. Richmond was lucky. She'd been spared the pain of losing them, having them die or go crazy. Spared the pain of having their love transform into hate.

Above the mantel of the huge fireplace in their living room, one gilt-framed photo stood. Dean and his family: a younger sister, two sturdy-looking parents, his mother in a lace-edged shirt and his father in a tie, and his sister in overalls and Dean, on the verge of teenagehood, his mouth full of braces, his hair sculpted into a mullet—​dorky and adorable and vulnerable and small. He was holding his sister's hand. Oh, to have a sister like that.

I picked up Mrs. Richmond's phone and dialed.

“Hello?” the voice chirped.

“Rosie.”

“Where are you?” she asked. “You're supposed to be home. You are in some serious trouble.”

“Keep your voice down,” I said. “Can you get me some clothes?”

“Why would I do that?”

“Because you're my sister, and when Dad dies someday, I'll be all you've got.”

The silence indicated she was considering my logic.

“And someday, during a solar eclipse when everything stands on its head, you will be in trouble, and I'm going to help you.”

“Are you running away again?” she asked quietly. “Or did Dad kick you out?”

“No. I don't know. I just need something to wear, and I don't want to see Dad.”

“Okay,” she said. “Where are you?”

I took a deep breath, hoping she could keep my secrets. “I'm right next door.”

When Dean returned from the shower, Rosie
was there with a pile of my clothes.

“Hey,” he said. “Rosie, right?”

She saluted. “At your service.” Ah, Rosie—​possibly even dorkier than I and totally not worried about it.

I took the clothes from her. She'd picked out my best cut-up T-shirt and my favorite jean skirt and my jellies. “Thanks.”

“What are you going to do, Carrie? You can't stay away from home forever.”

I shrugged. “I was thinking maybe I'd go stay with Mom.”

Rosie scrunched up her face in surprise, suspicion, confusion, all of it swirling in her furrowed brows, but before she could say anything, we heard another voice.

“Hello, Carrie. Hello, Rosie.” It was Mrs. Richmond. I hadn't heard the screen door open. She had brassy dyed hair set in poodle curls, AKA perm-gone-wrong, and a full preppy uniform of a blue blazer with brass buttons and an elastic belt with little whales. I felt like a monster, muddy and dressed like a bum.