The Chaos of Stars (16 page)

I fight the odd urge to shudder, and stalk out of the museum instead. I can run three errands in two hours if I literally
run
.

Laden with bags, I drain the last of my Coke. I had three of them instead of anything to eat. It was faster and I couldn’t get that dry sensation out of my mouth. Besides, Michelle’d have to stand on a stepladder to smell my breath, so I think I’m okay. Except it’s 6:24 p.m., and I’m hovering outside the taped-up
do not enter
signs blocking the wing-in-progress. She can’t get mad at six minutes early. The plastic handles of the bags are threatening to tear and burning where they dig into my exposed forearms.

I duck under the rope as a ringing laugh echoes from behind the closed double doors, and a warm feeling instinctively rushes through me.

Then I realize who the laugh belongs to.

“Amun-Re, I’ll kill him,” I growl, kicking the doors open. Tyler doesn’t even have the decency to look ashamed of herself; she’s sitting in the corner on the floor, reading something out loud off her phone. Ry laughs again, not looking up from where he is paging through the plans.
My
plans. For
my
room.

I let off a stream of the foulest cursing I can think of, the Croatian rolling off my tongue as it usually does in times like these. “Get your hands off of my papers,” I snap when I finally run out of names to call him. His smile has dropped away, and underneath his olive skin the blood has drained from his face.

Tyler’s eyes are wide, but she still looks like she’s enjoying everything. “Was that Arabic?”

“No, it was Elvish. What is he doing here?”

Ry shakes his head, as though coming out of a fog. “I’m helping.”

“You are not—” My mouth freezes as I look around the skeleton of the room. Three-fourths of the bracings are up, perfectly placed. It is precision, quality work. When I left two hours ago, only a third of them were done, and I had been working since 3:30 a.m.

Oh, no.

“But . . . Michelle said they have no budget for help,” I stutter.

“Volunteering,” he says with that brilliant, dimpled smile. “Looks great on college applications.”

“How did you—?” I put my hand against one of the bracings.

“Theater tech crew since middle school. I’ve built dozens of sets. Plus my dad is an artisan. I’m best with metal, but I should be able to handle all this work and the wiring.”

The wiring. That’s been my biggest concern from the beginning. I’ve never handled wiring in any of my designs, and even though I know how I
want
it to work, I’ve been sort of hoping that somehow it will work on its own. The special-ordered lights and equipment are sitting, perfectly boxed, stacked against the wall in my room at Sirus’s house. I can’t even look at them without feeling sick.

If the lights aren’t perfect, there is no point to this room. If I blow this room, I prove to Michelle (and myself) that I can’t handle big projects.

“You really think you can do the lights?”

“I’m sure of it.”

I close my eyes and put a hand over my aching forehead. I don’t want him here. He makes things weird and complicated and I hate that I have his face memorized, that I can recall exactly how his hand felt slipping into mine.

Because the worst part, the real reason I haven’t let him call me, the real reason I am now terrified of him?

Part of me wonders how bad it would have been to let myself feel what I wanted to feel, and see where things went with letting him hold my hand.

I can’t do that. I can’t set myself up for loss. I can’t want something that can never be lasting or real.

But this room is real, and, chaos take me, I need him.

“I own you,” I say.

Ry’s dark eyebrows rise in a silent question.

“For the next week you have no life outside of this room. I own your time, your brain, and especially your truck. You do exactly what I tell you to do without question. This is
my
room and you are only here as long as I want you to be. Understand?”

Ry nods, his smile sloppy with happiness that has no reason to be there.

“Good thing Scott isn’t here,” Tyler says, still texting. “He’d be totally hot for you after that speech.”

“You.” I point at her and she looks up, her expression exhausted. I soften my own and smile at her. “Go get food for everyone, because we’re all going to be here for a long time tonight. Take my card, and take your time.”

“Sir, yes, sir!” Tyler jumps up, mock-saluting. “I love it when you get bossy. It’s kind of adorable.” She rummages through my bag for my wallet, and runs.

I take a deep breath and grab the next bracing. Ry is instantly at my side, helping me move it into place. His movements are strong and assured; Tyler and I fumbled through this together, neither of us particularly skilled. He holds the awkwardly long two-by-four in place while I position the nail gun.

He waits to start talking until I’m in a rhythm. “So.”
Thunk
. “About the other night.”
Thunk
. “I got the feeling—and correct me if I’m wrong because I don’t speak Girl, though I’ve tried desperately to learn it—that you were”—
thunk
—“a little upset.”
Thunkthunkthunkthunk
.

“You’re at least remedial level in Girl,” I say through gritted teeth.

“What did I do?”

I turn to glare at him. He ruined everything, that’s what he did! “What part of ‘just friends’ didn’t you get?”

His smile is a masterpiece, a da Vinci study in innocence. But his blue, blue eyes spark with something else. “Friends hold hands.”

“Oh, do they?”

“All the time.”

“So you hold hands with Scott a lot, then.”

“Had to quit. Sweaty palms.”

“Tyler?”

“Too bony. Brought up childhood nightmares of dancing skeletons.”

“Any other friends I don’t know who you regularly clasp digits with in this apparently very normal aspect of friendship?”

“No, not really.”

“So by ‘friends’ and ‘all the time,’ you mean ‘no one’ and ‘never.’”

“Did I mention that English isn’t my first language? Much like with Girl, sometimes the nuances elude me.”

“Good thing you write poetry then.”

He laughs, throwing back his head like the force of mirth is too much for his neck to handle. It is an avalanche of a laugh, a zephyr wind that sweeps me back with its warm surprise, and I realize too late I am smiling and laughing with him.

Then his eyes meet mine and the warm desert wind zips away, leaving a vacuum in its wake, and there is no air in the room, no air between us, and I cannot look away. He leans in closer and his gravity-enhanced eyes flick down to my lips then back up to my eyes, binding me pulling me terrifying me.

“Isadora?”

“Yes?” I answer, but something’s wrong with my throat and it comes out strange and breathy. Does my name always sound like music?

“Could you maybe not point the nail gun at my chest?”

And there’s that air that was missing before. I thank the idiot gods for my dark skin as my face burns and I whip the gun back to the work that needs to be done. This room can’t be finished soon enough.

“How do you do it?” I ask Tyler, not looking up from the neon manicure I’m giving her. She’s spending the night so we can get an early start on painting the plywood boards tomorrow. And because Tyler convinced me we both needed a girls’ night or she would lose her mind. I’m so tired I can barely see straight.

“How do I do what?”

“How do you love Scott?”

“Whoa, hate my boyfriend much?”

I look up, panicked that I’ve offended her, but she’s still smiling. “No, no, that’s not what I meant. Scott is awesome. I mean, how do you . . . how do you let yourself love something you know will end? Don’t you feel sick all the time? Terrified? What will you do when you lose him? Even if you don’t break up, you’ll die. It won’t matter in the end.”

She takes the nail-polish brush out of my hands, screwing it back onto the bottle. “Isadora, sweetheart, that is the saddest thing I have ever heard. I don’t say this lightly, because my mom is a therapist and she drives me nuts with the analysis, but have you considered therapy?”

I shake my head, avoiding her eyes. “I don’t mean to be depressing. I just . . . I used to think I was part of something that would last forever, you know? And it didn’t. And I don’t want anything less than forever, because it feels so empty. I don’t ever want to be used again.”

She leans back against the edge of the bed and puts her arm around my shoulder, pulling me close. “I don’t know about forever. It’s not something that concerns me. And maybe Scott and I will get married and have fifty babies and be old and wrinkled together. Or maybe we’ll crash and burn and break up, and if it happens it’ll be devastating, but what we have now makes me happy. And I can live in that happy, and feel safe there, knowing that even if things change, I’ll always have had this. You know?”

I nod my head against her shoulder, but it’s a lie. I don’t know. I wish I did.

The sky is achingly blue, the air achingly sweet, my hand achingly aching. I finish drilling the last of the stars on my section of the huge sheets of thin plywood that will be the new walls and ceiling. My stars are so accurate you could navigate a boat by them. Assuming you had a boat that needed navigating in the middle of an exhibit in a museum.

The sound of the drill whining higher and lower as Ry works on the already-marked pieces drowns out almost everything, including the laughter from the tarp by the pool where Deena, Sirus, Tyler, and Scott are painting.

I crack my neck, raising my arms straight up to ease the pain in my back from spending so many hours leaning over. It’s been nice to work outside, at least, and I’m glad that Sirus and Deena have a big enclosed patio and pool instead of a yard.

Ry is both fast and accurate, and only a few minutes after I’m done, he’s already finished with his much larger section. We walk over to the others to help there. So many things to do, still. I keep a running list in my head, going over it constantly. I will not forget anything. Everything will be perfect.

“Honestly? I don’t get it.” Scott holds up one of the plastic pieces—one of a thousand—that will go into the drilled holes to secure the tiny lights. “These are black. So why are we painting them . . . black?”

“Different shades of black. They have to be exactly the same.”

“I beg to differ on your choice of semantics.” He adds another freshly painted piece to the “done” section of the tarp. “They do not
have
to be exactly the same. You
want
them to be.”

Sirus laughs. “And what Isadora wants has to happen. You don’t know her very well, do you?”

I resist the urge to glare. I’m trying not to be angry. So I settle for sticking my tongue out at him.

Deena slaps her husband’s shoulder. “Hey, I admire a little perfectionism. I wish it would rub off on you in the area of, say, folding laundry.”

“If you admire a little perfectionism, you must full-on worship Isadora,” Scott says, “because this goes way past a little.”

This time Tyler slaps Scott’s shoulder, making his brush jump and smear black paint on his hand.

“Okay, that’s all the sitting my pregnant joints can take.” Deena pushes herself up with a groan. “I’m taking my mandatory Saturday nap.”

Sirus follows her. “Duty calls. You know what they say: the family that naps together . . . ummm . . .”

“Gets the clap together?” Scott offers.

Sirus glares. “Do I need to ban you from my innocent baby sister?”

“No, sir! I meant, uh, gets to clap together.
To
. Not
the
.”

With a stern nod, Sirus leaves. I scoot into his spot, but the work here is almost done anyway, and we can’t do anything else until these dry and we test whether it’s better to insert them and then paint the boards, or paint the boards and then insert them.

“So, are you going to school here in the fall?” Scott asks, finishing his pile, then painting a long streak on Tyler’s pale-white arm. She keeps at her work, not even looking up.

“No, I already have my GED.”

“You graduated early? Or, wait, is that a normal time to graduate in Egypt?” He puts a curlicue on Tyler’s long, skinny bicep.

“I didn’t go to normal school. Homeschool, I guess, though I was mostly in charge of myself.” After I stopped wanting to learn the history of the gods, I set up my own course of study. I was quite rigid—I never wanted to be behind once I got out of my parents’ house.

“Ah. Boring! No wonder you’re willing to be friends with us. You don’t know any better.”

“I wish I’d been homeschooled,” Ry says, leaning back and stretching his face toward the sun with his eyes closed.

“Why?” Tyler keeps painting, though Scott has now started playing tic-tac-toe with messy black streaks on her bare calf.

Ry rubs the back of his neck, not looking at us. “Oh, you know. School can be . . . weird.”

“How so?” All I know about American high schools is what I’ve seen in movies, and I doubt it’s very accurate. Too many spontaneous, choreographed dances for real life. That or the American education system is seriously screwed up.

“Do you want me to finish yours?” Ry grabs for the rest of Tyler’s nearly gone pile.

“Don’t change the subject. How is it weird?”

“It’s kind of embarrassing.”

Tyler finally stops, leaning forward, the motion messing up Scott’s attempt at an
x
.

“You made me lose!” He paints an angry streak through the tic-tac-toe game.

“Shut up. Ry is telling an embarrassing story.”

“It’s not a big deal. There was just this girl, who got kind of . . . aggressive?”

“You got beat up by a girl?” Scott’s eyes light up with wonder and delight.

“No! She thought—do I have to tell this? We dated for a little while and then broke up, but she was really upset about it. It got so awkward I ended up eating lunch in the boys’ bathroom every day for the last two months of school to avoid her.”

“Oh, that’s so sad!” Tyler says.

“Was she ugly?” Scott asks, writing his name beneath the tic-tac-toe board.