The Chaos of Stars (18 page)

“I think they modeled this stuff after ambrosia,” Ry says, watching me with a tentative smile.

“I can feel it clogging my arteries as I eat. And I don’t care. It’s going to be such a happy death.” I finish before him and lean back against the roots, groaning and holding my stomach. “Too much. Not enough.”

He laughs, and I stare at the bits of sky bold enough to break through the dense, tangled weave of branches. I should have brought mints. My throat prickles with dryness, a strange, salt chemical taste that sucks the moisture out, leaving my tongue thick and chalky in my mouth.

The back of my neck tingles and I look around sharply.

“Something wrong?” Ry asks, wiping his mouth with a napkin.

“Do you smell something weird?” I don’t see anyone, but I can’t be
this
paranoid. There has to be a reason it smells like Sirus’s house did the day of the break-in.

“No, why?”

My phone rings before I can answer him. Mother on the caller ID. The ancient Egyptian in me wonders if the strange smell and fear are connected to my mother somehow, connected to the twisted memories I dream every night.

“My mom. Gotta answer.”

“No problem. I’ll go get my notebook and be right back.” He grabs our garbage and leaves. His limp has an odd grace to it, almost like a swagger without the arrogance. I love it—it’s enough of a break in his physical perfection to make him interesting where otherwise he’d be unreal.

Oh, floods, I am
not
watching him walk away.

I answer the phone with a distracted, “Hey.”

“Little Heart,” my mother says, and she sounds tired. Maybe that’s a normal mom thing, but Isis the Ever Energetic doesn’t do tired. Now I’m worried again. In her emails she said Nephthys has been staying with her around the clock. I wish I could be there, too. No, I don’t.

“What’s up? Are you okay?”

“I have not been well. But I’m feeling better. How are you?”

“Better is good. I’m fine. Busy.”

“That’s nice. Your work is going well? Your friends are kind?”

I’ve been trying to tell her more about my life in my emails. It feels . . . nice. Nice to be able to talk with her a little more. She never listened to me when I was at home, but she can’t very well ignore typed words she has to respond to. “Yeah, everything’s really good.”

“I am glad. I wanted to ask your opinion on colors for the baby’s room. You’re so much better with this than I am.”

I sit up straight. “Yeah, sure. What are you thinking?”

“I need something neutral, but I want it to be warm and welcoming. Maybe blue and yellow?”

I bite my lip, running through palettes in my head. “You don’t want to do a baby’s room in yellow—it’s not soothing enough. Brown and green will give you more options if it’s a girl and you want to add some pink accents. If you go with a spring green, it’s still a very warm color without the inherent energy of yellow.”

“Yes, I think you’re right.”

I smile. She really does value my opinion on this stuff, just like she told Michelle.

“Also, how many coats do you think we’ll need to cover up the black?”

“I would say—wait, the black? What room are you painting?” My heart skips erratically. She wouldn’t. She
wouldn’t
.

“Your old room.”

“MY ROOM? You’re painting over my room for some stupid baby?”

“Isadora! I didn’t think you’d mind. I have always used this room for babies.”

“I spent months decorating! It’s MINE. Of course I mind! Do you even care that I’m gone? Obviously you don’t think of me at all! I knew Osiris didn’t, but at least you pretended to care.” I stand, livid, almost screaming into the phone. I know I’m not going back home, but
she
doesn’t know that. How dare she destroy my work, give my place in the family
and
my room to my replacement.

“That’s enough!” The whipcrack of her voice makes my temple throb even over the phone. “If I’d known you would be so selfish and immature about this, I wouldn’t have brought it up. I’m very disappointed in you. You know your room is temporary. It isn’t the room that will matter in the future, and I don’t see you putting time and care into that one.”

“My—Amun-Re, Mother. You really think it’s okay to destroy the one thing that was mine because I still have my
tomb
? You really can’t wait for me to die, can you? It’s amazing. It’s absolutely amazing that the goddess of motherhood can suck
so bad
at being a mother! Well, guess what? You can give
both
rooms to your new victim, because
I am never coming home
. Ever. EVER!” I scream the last word and throw my phone down, wishing she were here so I could hit her, physically hurt her to make her feel what I’m feeling, to finally show her what she does to me on the inside.

And then somehow my rage is leaking out my eyes and I sit back hard onto the roots, my tailbone stinging, and dig my knees into my eyeballs as I wrap my arms around my legs.

I hate my parents. I hate them. And I hate that I hate them, because it means I care. I wish I could feel the same way they obviously feel about me—I wish they were the nothing to me that I am to them.

Ry’s arm around my shoulder is surprising; I’m still not used to being touched, and it’s comforting. “Is your brother here?” he asks. “I thought I saw him.”

I shrug, not lifting up my head. “Maybe. He’s been paranoid lately. I can’t remember if I told him I’d be here tonight or not. I’ll text him and tell him I’m coming home now.”

“I have a better idea. Text him and tell him you’ll be home late. I know where we need to go.”

The Milky Way is above me, each star a perfect point against the black night sky. I had gotten so used to San Diego’s light pollution that I’d forgotten just what, exactly, the stars were supposed to look like.

But even as I drink them in, let them fill me while the desert night air tickles my skin, I can’t help but notice something is off. They don’t anchor me like they used to. They’re still mine, my soul still sings to see them, but . . . I don’t know. That invisible something, that heartstring that used to stretch between me and my guiding stars is different. It’s shifted, and I don’t know where or why. Maybe it’s because Orion—the stars Orion—isn’t out?

I wiggle my legs, trying to ease my spine off a raised groove in the metal of Ry’s truck bed.

“I should have brought pads or something,” he says from where he’s lying flat on his back next to me.

“No, this is perfect.”

We drove straight east, where the sprawling tangle of the city suddenly ended in nothing. Through and over a mountain with wind turbines so big it looked as though the gods from one of Ry’s myths set them there. Then back down the mountain and past kilometers and kilometers of horizon-meltingly flat farmland to the waves and crests of sand dunes in the middle of nowhere.

Though the air still tastes different, the sand and the stars surround me like a blanket of home, a snatch of comfort and familiarity in the middle of a strange new land. And Ry found it for me when I needed it the very most.

I turn my head and look at his dark profile as he studies the sky—his long, straight nose, angled jaw, full lips. He could be a Greek statue come to life. I smile at the thought, and a small line in my chest, the line that anchors me and connects me to my Orion, suddenly gives me a tug.

Toward
this
Orion.

I close my eyes and hold perfectly still. The impulse to scoot over and close the gap between our bodies, to rest my head in that spot between his shoulder and chest where I know—I know—it will fit perfectly, to twine my fingers through his—

I don’t want that. I won’t. I can accept that he is important to me. He’s a friend. I’d had no idea how much I needed friends until Tyler and Ry. And I’m vulnerable right now, still trying to find
me
in this new place, still trying to fill the holes inside. I can’t seem to keep my heart from leaking out of the cracks, like sand clutched in a fist.

But I won’t fill those holes with him. I can’t. To do that would invite other holes to be punched in right next to the ones my parents made.

I will fill myself with the desert and the sky. I will be stone and stars, unchanging and strong and safe. The desert is complete; it is spare and alone, but perfect in its solitude. I will be the desert.

I open my eyes to see Ry staring at me, and my desert soul erupts with turquoise water, floods and cascades and waterfalls rushing in around my stone, swirling and eddying around my rocky parts, pushing and reshaping and filling every hidden dark spot.

“Stop it!” I gasp.

“What?”

“That thing you’re doing! With your eyes!”

“Um, opening them? Or blinking? Should I not blink?”

“Just—make them less blue or something.”

He laughs, oblivious to my drowning desert. “It’s pitch-black out here. You can’t see what color they are.”

“But I still know, and they know I know. So just—point them somewhere else.”

He blinks, slowly, the line of dark lashes standing out against his skin in a semicircle smile, mocking me before he opens them again. “But it’s okay to look at friends, remember?”

“Shut up.” I smack my hand against his chest and then it stays there and I need to pull it back I can’t leave it there why isn’t my arm pulling it back and

oh idiot gods I can feel his heart beating and nothing has ever felt so simple and pure and honest and right in my entire life.

GET OUT OF HERE,
my brain screams. Move your hand, Isadora. Move it. Move it. But that line, that traitorous anchor that misaligned, that picked the wrong Orion, it’s singing out to stay.

Ry reaches up, ever so slowly, and puts his hand over mine and now his heartbeat is underneath it and his skin is on top of it and I can’t breathe, I’m holding my breath because if I let it go I have to make a choice to drown or to flee, and I cannot make this choice

I like the person I am with him

and no one’s skin has ever felt this way before

and every part of me—
every part
—is in those few square inches of palm and finger connected to him

and I am going under

and I don’t care

“Isadora?”

My name in his voice sends a jolt through me, creates me in the way he sees me and feels about me and the way I would be with my name in his mouth forever. Finally I understand the power in names, the power that we give people when we tell them our names.

“Orion,” I whisper, and he is. Orion. Forever now,
he
has replaced my Orion stars in name.

He lifts his free hand toward my face, turning on his side to close the distance between us and—

I panic. I have never been so terrified in my entire life. This is a beginning and that means there will be an end and I can’t, I can’t have something that feels this way end.

“I can’t.” I sit up, pulling my hand from his. It’s cold, so cold, colder than the rest of me and I want to hold it myself to try and get back that sensation but I cross my arms over my chest instead, cut off the errant line connecting me to him. “I’m sorry. I don’t want to do this. I can’t. Please take me back now.”

He looks like he has something to say, but I stand up and jump over the side of the truck bed, then sit in the passenger seat. After too long Orion—
Ry
—gets in and starts the truck.

I will not drown tonight.

I will not drown ever.

I am the desert. I am the desert. I am stone.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

.....................................................................

Set and Horus continued to challenge each other in the courts of the gods. They fought in ludicrous displays of strength and cunning—including a spectacular event that involved seeing who could stay underwater as a hippo longest. That one resulted in my mother’s decapitation.

It didn’t stick, obviously. Gods are awfully hard to kill.

In the end it was Osiris who put an end to the contests between Set and Horus, threatening to drag everyone into the underworld if they didn’t cease fighting.

My father’s equivalent of “Knock it off or you’re all grounded.”

WE DRIVE IN SILENCE UNTIL THE MOUNTAINS
loom dark and swallow us into their winding embrace.

“Can’t or don’t want to?” Ry says.

“What?” I ask, my forehead against the glass of the window. I’m trying to pull the smooth chill into my head, let it flush out the water sloshing around in my soul.

“You said you can’t, then you said you don’t want to. Which is it?”

“Can’t. Won’t. Don’t want to. It’s all the same thing. Let’s don’t talk, okay?” If cutting off a beginning hurts this bad, I can’t imagine what ending something later would do to me. I just want to go home and go to sleep.

Too bad sleep isn’t very comforting lately.

“No, they really aren’t the same thing. If you don’t want to—I mean, genuinely are not attracted to me, do not think of me that way, cannot stomach the thought of touching me—then I would understand and I would never press the issue again. But that’s not how you feel.”