The Chaos of Stars (8 page)

I lift a finger self-consciously to my chopped locks. “Oh, yeah. You have a good memory.”

“No, I mean, I didn’t recognize you when we met before. But now I do.”

I frown. “Umm, what?” Why would he have recognized me before? I doubt he’s spent any summers in Abydos.

“Sorry.” He smiles, his teeth big and white and very straight. “I mean, of course I remember you. I remember interesting faces.”

“Interesting? Wow. That’s flattering.”

He laughs. “You have perfect, classic features. I like it. You don’t look like everyone else here.”

“Lucky me?” I take a long draw on my straw, not sure what we’re supposed to talk about now. It’s not like we’re friends. I don’t even know Ry. Why did he sit with me?

He keeps staring, this strange expression on his face. Finally, his beautiful lips once again parting in a smile like he knows a joke I don’t, he pulls his pen from behind his ear and goes back to the tattered black notebook. He starts scribbling away like I’m not even here. Which, yet again, begs the question of why he sat here in the first place.

“Sorry,” he says, not looking up. “Just gotta get this description down before I lose it. Suddenly I have a deadline.”

“Sure.” I have no idea what he’s talking about, but I’m drinking my smoothie so fast my throat feels like it’s caked in ice. The sooner I finish, the sooner I have two hands to steer my bike. He’s too handsome. That’s what it is. He’s too handsome, and the way he stands with his shoulders thrown back, the way that grin slowly splits apart his face, the way it tells you that everything is funny to him and always will be because he is so pretty he can laugh at anything and get away with it, yes, all of that, that is what I will not like about him.

I don’t know why I have such an itching need to invent reasons to dislike him. But it’s important. I can feel a strange something budding inside of me. I refuse to let it take root.

And he’s still writing in his stupid notebook. He’s
rude
and arrogant. And I don’t like the way one of his curls flops down on his forehead. It’s stupid. I want to push it off, back into the rest of his hair.

No I don’t. I don’t want to touch him. I don’t care to find out if his hair is as soft as it looks. Why can’t I drink this smoothie faster?

“Okay.” He sets his pen down emphatically and looks up at me with a smile. “I always have to write these things when I think of them. Even if it turns out to be crap later, you never know, right?”

“Umm, yeah.”

He waits for a few seconds. “You aren’t going to ask me what I’m writing, are you?”

I shrug. “Nope.”

“I like that. I like your hair, too. The green is a nice contrast.”

“Wanted something different.”

“I declare it a success.”

I roll my eyes. “My life is complete.” I take a few last desperate gulps while he sits there, leaning back, completely at his ease, watching me with that infuriating secret smile. He’s probably always this secure. Is he trying to flirt with me? I have no idea. When I’d go out on the rare excursion with my mother, it was easy enough to brush off any hopeful flirters by pretending I didn’t speak Arabic. (Though often as not they were trying to flirt with my mother, too. Blech.)

Unfortunately, I can’t pretend like I don’t speak English with Ry.

“Well, nice seeing you again.” I stand and, to my chagrin, he does too.

“What are you doing?”

“Throwing away this empty cup.”

He laughs. He does that a lot. “I mean, today. Let me show you around. I am a living Google Map when it comes to the best restaurants in San Diego.”

“So is that what’s in the notebook? Restaurant reviews and maps?”

He laughs again. He tips his head back and his throat moves in this interesting way. I’ll bet he practices in front of the mirror. “Nope. Maybe the next notebook. But have you been to the harbor yet? There’s a genuinely terrifying sculpture that you have to see to believe.”

“Thanks, but I have my bike. Gotta get it back.”

“Not a problem!” He points to the parking lot, where a truck sits. Not just any truck. A fully restored truck straight out of the 1950s, painted sky blue with a white stripe, bursting with personality that modern trucks only wish they had. It is twenty different kinds of awesome.

“Floods,” I whisper under my breath.

“What?”

I shake my head. “Sorry, I’m just crushing on your truck.” He beams and I inwardly cringe. Why did I admit that?

“She’s pretty great, isn’t she?”

I pick up my bike. This has gotten off track. I don’t know why he’s so eager to hang out with me today. And I don’t care. I have no interest in boys, now or ever. I can’t help but notice him, and—oh, idiot gods, I am
definitely
attracted to him. This is how it starts. This is how I set myself up for pain and tragedy and endings where I want eternities.

I refuse. I refuse it all. I will never attach myself to someone else. I can end everything before it starts and be free and alone and perfectly happy.

“Maybe another time. My brother’s waiting for me.”

“Can I give you a ride home?”

“Sorry, my mother told me never to accept rides from strangers.” Not true; it was never an issue. I was never far enough away from her as a child for her to worry. But it was something she
would
say to me. Hmm . . . actually, I’m glad she never said it to me, because if she had, I’d be forced to ride with him just to go against her.

“I’ll have to work on being less strange, then. It was good to finally see you.” That secret smile again. I want to smoosh his cheeks together to get rid of it.

I wave, climbing onto my bike and peddling away. At the corner light I risk a glance back to see if he’s watching me. He’s sitting, scribbling madly in his notebook. Good. I didn’t want him to be watching me.

Boys suck.

Even when they have perfect blue eyes and ridiculously cool trucks. Maybe especially then.

I punch in the code to the garage, dumping my bike against the wall. Blue, blue, blue. I need to get that color out of my system. I’ll figure out where to—

I pause, halfway through the door from the garage to the laundry room.

Something is wrong.

The now-bare skin at the back of my neck prickles as I stare into the empty house. Sirus is on an LA drive today. Deena is still at work.

I breathe in deeply, and there, again—something is wrong. Their house always smells vaguely of Tide detergent and the cold salt of the sea, but there’s too much salt now. Salt and . . . chlorine?

Maybe they had someone here cleaning the pool today and didn’t tell me.

I walk forward, silently, cautiously. Through the kitchen and into the dining room, where something crunches underfoot. Glass—hundreds of shards of glass. A breeze cuts across me and I look up to see that the sliding glass door to the patio and pool is smashed out, gaping and jagged and open.

Every sense on alert, I slowly retreat into the kitchen and slide a long, serrated knife out of the block on the counter. Keeping my back to the wall, I creep past the dining room, into the family room. Everything seems in order. TV and electronics still where they ought to be—even Deena’s sleek laptop, just sitting there on the couch.

I keep going, the only noise wind chimes drifting in from the patio, their cheerful notes at odds with the electric atmosphere inside. I stop dead when I come to the entry.

The front door is wide open.

I know—I
know
—it was closed when I pulled up on my bike not two minutes ago. Whoever was here is gone.

Or maybe they aren’t. I look up the stairs, only half a flight visible before it turns around a sharp corner. Clutching the knife, I walk up the stairs, each step measured and silent. If they are still here, they know I am, too, because the garage door opened. Hopefully they heard that and ran. But if not . . .

My breaths come fast, my heartbeat racing. I make it to the landing at the top of the stairs, the second-story hall stretching out in front of me. The first door on my right is already open. I peek around the doorframe and then whip my head back so I can process what I saw. Empty. This is the room that’ll be the baby’s, and there’s nothing in it but a scattering of paint-sample squares and some empty boxes.

The next door is a closet. I open it, cringing at the squeaky hinges, and stab inward with the knife.

Nothing.

Three more rooms. The bathroom, my room, and the master bedroom. The bathroom is easily cleared—thankfully they have a glass shower door rather than a curtain. I creep across the hall to my room, painfully aware of how loud doorknobs click if you don’t open them slowly. I push the door, and—

Floods.

The drawers have been pulled out of the dresser and thrown everywhere. There’s a dent in the wall above where one lies smashed and broken on the floor. My clothes are strewn madly about the room. A notebook I had for writing down design ideas has been torn apart, individual sheets scattered among the clothes.

My suitcase is in the middle of the room, literally ripped open, the pockets sliced and gaping like wounds. My closet door gapes wide, everything flung out. The whole room smells like the weird combination of scents downstairs, magnified.

I take one step in and hear more glass cracking underfoot. I lean down to pick up the only picture I brought—a framed shot of my mother and me, on the banks of the Nile, when I was ten. I’d left it in my suitcase, along with the amulets she forced me to bring. Those, too, are underfoot, each snapped in half.

I don’t—I can’t even—what? Why?

There’s a noise from downstairs and I whip around, brandishing the knife.

“Isadora?” Sirus calls, fear in his voice. “Isadora? Are you home?”

Letting out a breath I’ve been holding for far too long, I close my bedroom door and answer him.

Deena’s still out on the driveway talking with the police officers. While she found time between cataloging the house for any missing items and watching the police dust for prints to tell me she loves my hair, somehow I don’t think it made the right impression on the law-enforcement end of things. I was interviewed four times, most of the questions revolving around whether I knew anyone who might have done this.

I know a grand total of three people here that I’m not related to, and somehow I doubt Tyler is the smash-glass-doors-and-destroy-rooms type.

“Why didn’t you call the police?” Sirus asks, shaking his head as I hold the dustpan for the shards of glass. No prints anywhere; all that’s left now is cleaning up the mess.

“Didn’t think of it.”

“Honestly, Isadora, you don’t live in the middle of the desert with a bunch of gods anymore. There are a lot of dangerous people around. You should have left the house immediately.”

He’s right, of course. It never crossed my mind.

“If something had happened to you . . . I’m just so glad no one was home.”

“Do they think it’s someone with a grudge against Deena?” She knows most of the officers who showed up, and she works for the government, after all.

“She’s never been in criminal prosecuting. The loonies she deals with are usually rich, entitled loonies. They’re the suing type, not the violent type.”

He still looks uneasy. We all are. Knowing it was that simple for someone to come into the house? Everything feels different now.

The front door closes, and then Deena walks in and leans against the wall, surveying the broken door with an exhausted expression, hand absently rubbing her stomach. “They think it was someone looking for prescription drugs. You must have scared him off before he could get through all the rooms.”

“I am the scariest,” I say, dumping another load of shards into the trash with a discordant tinkling.

“I’ll take over here,” she says. “When we’re done with the glass and get something taped up over the door, I’ll help with your room.”

“It’s okay. It’s my stuff, I’ll clean it up.”

“I’m so sorry. Nothing like this has ever happened before.”

“It’s not your fault,” I say. “Just random, right?” But it
feels
personal. It feels like chaos caught up to me and let me know it’s here with a vengeance.

I walk up the stairs and stand on the threshold of my room, staring at the destruction, and I can’t help but shiver, putting my hand on the back of my neck. I pick up the photo in its frame. The crack in the glass runs right between my mother and me.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

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In the history of mythology in ancient Egypt, Isis is not only the mother of Horus, she’s also occasionally his wife. While deeply disturbing to me, this has less to do with actual relationships and more to do with the balance of power and worship. As Hathor fell out of favor, my mother gladly stepped in and usurped her followers, thereby taking her roles, her domains, and even her husband.

Eventually the gods settled into their most commonly worshipped forms—in this case, Isis as mother and not wife, and Hathor as very annoyed wife, still angry over the loss of her worshippers and favorite cow-horned headdress.