Second Star (13 page)

I wonder just how long we were dancing on the beach, just how much time we’ve spent together. Wait, I’ve been on the beach with Jas before.

“What did you mean when you said I looked different?”

“What are you talking about, sweet girl?”

“On the beach. You said living in Kensington agrees with me.”

Jas’s teeth are so white when he smiles, I bet he scares the sharks.

“I meant that you looked beautiful, Wendy.”

I laugh. What a funny word. “Bee-yoo-tee-full!” I shout, each syllable making me laugh harder.

I’m in a bed. The softest bed in the entire world, softer even than the bed in the house on Brentway. I start laughing again: did I really help rob a house? The sheets in this bed are cotton, but they’re silky as satin, and the pillows are fluffy beneath my head. The room is dark, but my eyes are wide open. Suddenly, I’m thirsty, thirstier than I’ve ever been in my whole life. I open my mouth to ask for water, but my throat is too parched to say a word. But then I roll over and a tall glass of water is here on the floor beside the bed, waiting for me.

And sitting beside the glass, he is still there. Refilling my glass, offering me coffee and tea, crackers and Popsicles.

Oh my god, a Popsicle would be so delicious right now. How did he know that?

Well, of course he knows that. He knows exactly what a person high on dust would want. Which reminds me of why I came to him in the first place. Why I took this drug in the first place. I open my mouth to ask my questions, but instead of speaking, I’m coughing. He hands me another glass of water, so cold, so delicious, that I wonder why I ever wasted time drinking anything other than water in the first place.

I sit up. I stand. I shout question after question, and I swear I can see my words hitting Jas like bullets, sliding down his body like ink.

I drop the empty glass on the floor and collapse into the bed. His hand reaches out for me, brushing my hair away from my face. I coo like a baby. His touch feels so good. He drops his hand and slides across the floor, backing away from the bed, putting some distance between us. But he stays where I can see him, disappearing only to bring me more water, an orange-flavored Popsicle, a plate piled high with crackers and cookies.

Why is he still with me? Why does he care?

21

I wake up on the ground.

I’m not supposed to be here. I’m supposed to be spending this summer at home, with my parents, shopping for towels and pillows to bring with me to Stanford in the fall. I’m supposed to be on the beach with Fiona, slathering on sunscreen while she sprays herself with tanning oil, watching from a distance while she and Dax splash hand in hand through the waves.

“This is all wrong,” I say out loud, and my throat feels like it’s on fire. I swallow, cringing at the sour taste in my mouth.

Someone is grabbing me. I turn toward the sensation, expecting to see Jas, but instead I see Fiona’s face, hear Fiona’s voice saying, “My god, Wendy, what happened to you?”

Even though she’s standing right beside me, it sounds like she’s miles away. She repeats her question, louder this time. She’s in her pajamas, her eyes still cloudy with sleep. I must have woken her.

The scent of eucalyptus tells me where I am. I’m sitting on Fiona’s front porch; my fingers are still pressing her doorbell. I drop my hand into my lap. I’m shivering. How did I get here?

I close my eyes, willing myself to remember anything that happened over the past few days. I remember kissing Pete on the cliffs. I thought nothing had ever felt as good as those kisses; I thought nothing ever would.

But in a flash I remember Jas’s party. Pete’s kisses didn’t even feel as good as falling to the ground felt when I was on dust.

I went to the party looking for answers about my brothers. Did I even remember to ask Jas about them? I don’t know. I wonder if that’s what happened to my brothers; if they simply forgot to come home after they took dust, if they simply forgot that my parents and I were back in the glass house waiting for them.

I remember running down the beach, the waves crashing in their perfect rhythm, one right after another, a surfer’s paradise. I remember the shadow of someone else beside me. I remember reaching for Pete and finding Jas instead.

I let Fiona lift me off the ground and pull me into her house.

My car is parked in the driveway beside us, but there’s no way I could have driven it here, not in the state I’m in.

I may never stop crying. Sometimes it comes in choking, wracking sobs and sometimes it’s silent tears streaming down my face and filling my throat with the taste of salt water.

I cry until I think there can’t possibly be any water left in me for more tears, and then I cry some more.

Fiona’s mother is standing just inside the doorway. She’s wearing her bathrobe.

“Wendy?” she asks, like she’s not sure it’s really me. “What are you doing here?” She looks from me to Fiona, a dozen questions just waiting to be asked.

But before she can ask a single one, I ask one of my own.

“What time is it?”

“It’s six in the morning,” she answers.

“Exactly?”

She glances at a clock behind her. “Six-oh-seven,” she says.

I actually stop crying for a second. That’s how good it feels to know exactly what time it is.

Fiona whispers that I should go to her room. Even in my addled state, I know exactly how to get from the front door to Fiona’s room; remember, from years of countless sleepovers, how much Fiona hates being woken up in the morning.

I climb into her bed, her pink sheets as familiar to me as my own. I wrinkle my nose because there is a smell here I don’t recognize. Something new mixed in with Fiona’s shampoo and the fancy detergent her housekeeper uses.

It’s Dax, I realize with a start. Dax’s smell is all over.

I nestle deep under her covers, letting myself be drenched in her scent and Dax’s, too. Willing away the smells of Kensington, of the beach, of the ocean, of Pete, of Jas.

“Wendy,” Fiona says slowly, “I’m calling your parents.”

“No,” I manage to get out between sobs. “Wait.”

I really don’t know why I’m crying like this. I’ve never been much of a crier. Maybe these tears are just a chemical reaction, some dip in my neurotransmitters from everything the drug used up. Everything it’s still using up as it snakes its way through my system.

“I lied to you,” I say carefully, struggling to hold my voice even. “I wasn’t at a hotel all this time, grieving.”

Fiona seems disappointed in me. “Where were you?” she asks carefully.

“I was looking for my brothers,” I say, and then the floodgates open. I tell her everything: about Kensington Beach, about the waves that flow like clockwork and the sand as soft as flour. I tell her about Jas and dust, and my brothers getting kicked out and leaving to surf Witch Tree, about cliffs and the tiles in the house that never got dirty. I even tell her about the party and the drug so powerful that it made lights bleed and pain a pleasure. I tell her about everything.

Everything but Pete. I don’t make a decision to leave him out, not exactly. But when I tell the story, he just kind of stays out of it. Maybe I’m still too embarrassed that I fell for him when I should have known better.

While I speak Fiona holds my hand, and sometimes she stops to hug me. She nods when she should, her eyes widen when they should, they even brim with tears when I tell her that my brothers were hooked on drugs. When I finish, I say, “I know it sounds crazy. I know I must look crazy.”

Fiona shakes her head warmly. “No,” she says. “It all makes perfect sense.”

I’m so grateful for her understanding that I begin crying again, and Fiona pulls me into a hug.

“You need to get some rest,” she says soothingly. “Lie down. Go to sleep.”

“I need some rest,” I echo, remembering that I was up all night. Fiona pulls the covers up around me like I’m a little kid and closes the door gently behind her.

Before it clicks shut, she says, “Everything’s going to be okay.”

I close my eyes and welcome sleep.

I awake to whispers.

I don’t know who Fiona is talking to, but whoever it is, she’s telling them my story; telling them about Kensington Beach, and dust, and my brothers. I get up and open the door.

Fiona and my parents are standing in the hallway outside.

“Mom, Dad,” I say, and they look at me sharply, sadly, almost guiltily, as though they were doing something to me behind my back. I try to ignore my pounding headache. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you right away. I thought I could handle it by myself. I was wrong, I know I was wrong. Did you call the police? Tell them to reopen the case? To head to Witch Tree, wherever that is?”

I try to smile, but my parents look so devastated that it’s impossible.

“Wendy,” my father says gently, “your brothers—”

“I know, I know. They’re addicts. It’s bad. But—”

“No,” he says firmly. “No.”

“I didn’t want to believe it at first either.”

“Wendy,” he says again, “your brothers are dead.”

I shake my head; they don’t understand.

“Wendy. Your brothers died months ago. They found their boards up the coast, destroyed.”

I look at Fiona, desperately confused. “I thought you told them—”

“I did, Wendy, I did.”

“But then—”

“Wendy—”

I shake my head. “You didn’t believe me?”

“Wendy,” Fiona says, “it makes perfect sense, like I said. We even called that grief counselor and she agreed. You’re so torn up about the loss of your brothers that your brain constructed this, this…”

She searches for the words. Somewhere in this house, I know, is a pad of paper scrawled with notes they took while talking to the grief counselor.

Finally, she says, “This alternate reality to protect yourself from what really happened.”

“I know what really happened,” I say. My head is pounding so hard that I think I could dance in time to its rhythm.

“You have been taking drugs,” my mother says, thin-lipped. “This is all some kind of psychosis.”

“Is that what you told them?” I ask, turning back to Fiona. “Just because I was gone for a few weeks?”

Fiona shakes her head. “It started before you left. At the bonfire, the night we graduated. Even Dax thought you were acting strange—”

“Well if Dax thought so, it must be true. He knows me so well, after all,” I spit.

Fiona bites her lip and looks at her feet. I turn to face my mother.

“Mom, you have to listen to me—”

She shakes her head. “We’re going home.”

I open my mouth to protest, to insist, to beg. But my mother looks so helpless, so defeated, so
empty
, that instead I just nod and follow my parents out the door. I even let Fiona hug me goodbye, when what I really want to do is scream at her, maybe even hit her for not believing me, for betraying me.

Nana is waiting at the door, but she doesn’t run to me the way she usually does when I come home. Instead, she backs away from me, wary, like she doesn’t recognize me. Like I’m a stranger. I start crying all over again.

“I know, honey,” my father says, coming up from behind me and putting an arm around my shoulder. “I know.”

My mother carries my duffel bag in from the car—I don’t even remember bringing it with me from Pete’s house, but I must have—unzips it on the kitchen counter, and begins sifting through it like she’s looking for contraband. It takes me a second to realize that she’s looking for drugs.

“Mom,” I say, “there’s nothing bad in there. Just clothes and some extra cash.” She won’t even look at me, just keeps going through my bag.

“Why don’t you go to your room, honey?” my father says finally.

“Am I being punished?”

“Of course not.”

“Then why are you sending me to my room?”

He sighs. “Because that’s what they told us to do. Something about reestablishing authority.”

I shake my head. I wonder if my parents would even have noticed that I was gone if I hadn’t come back in the state I’m in. If I weren’t aching with withdrawal, I think a tiny part of me would be glad that they’re paying attention. Even though they’re wrong—about me, about my brothers, about Kensington—they seem to have begun to come out of the fog they’ve been living in for the last nine months.

“Who told you to do that?”

“The people at the center.”

“What center?”

“It’s for people with problems like yours.”

No one has problems like mine
, I think but do not say.

He continues, “Supposed to be the best in the country. They’ll admit you just as soon as a spot opens up.”

As soon as a spot opens up.

He doesn’t offer me any further explanation—will it be days, weeks, months? Will I still be allowed to start college in September? I want to ask, but I can feel my pulse pounding beneath my temples, and I’m pretty sure that if I open my mouth again nothing but sobs will come out.

I have to beg Nana to follow me into my room, and even once inside, she keeps her distance from me. I can’t say I blame her. I catch a glimpse of my face in the mirror; I don’t look anything like myself. I can’t say exactly what about me has changed; my hair is the same color, my eyes the same shape. My skin is tanner, I suppose. There’s something else, something deeper that’s changed. I still look like me, but off somehow. Like I’ve aged ten years in a few days.

Or maybe it’s just that I’ve cried so much that my face has been emptied out, dry and salty as a desert.

22

I don’t know how much time goes by before the pain sets in. Something beyond the headache and past the tears, an ache from somewhere deep inside my chest that radiates into my joints so that I can’t turn my neck or grip a pencil. I want to cry out, but I don’t want to make Nana more frightened of me than she already is. And it’s not like I want my parents to come running.

How can it hurt this much? I only used the drug once. No wonder my brothers went back to Jas and asked for more. No wonder Pete couldn’t convince my brothers to stop.

Suddenly, I’m breathtakingly, teeth-chatteringly cold. This is what people mean when they say their blood runs cold. This is a cold that’s coming from
inside
of me, as though my very bones are turning to ice. I burrow under my covers, an animal hibernating her way through the cold winter.