The Stars Will Shine (23 page)

But then I see him. No, not Aiden.

Dylan.

Dylan, who just a minute ago was being dragged, half out of it, toward the door by Aiden, now barges through the crowd right toward me with a level of adrenaline and sobriety he shouldn’t even be capable of right now. There’s fury in his eyes and rigidness in every single facial feature. I see his hands fly upward, and suddenly the guy behind me is jerked sideways and thrown to the floor. Everyone around us scrambles out of the way and stops dancing to take in the scene.

“Get off of her!” Dylan shouts down at him. He stares the guy down hard, his hands fisting at his sides. Colored lights still flash all around us, seemingly at twice the speed now. “She doesn’t want you groping her!”

The guy stares up at Dylan, wide-eyed and shaking beneath his skater boy clothes.

“Piss off!” Dylan yells again, pointing the guy to the door. Just then, Aiden runs up, breathless.

“Dude, what hap—” But then he sees the guy on the floor and the way Dylan still glares down at him. Aiden looks up right at me then, and I stare back vacantly, feeling so far away from everything all of a sudden. Aiden comes over and takes my elbow gently.

“Are you okay?” he asks quietly. He looks so concerned, but I just continue to stare at him, saying nothing. “Did that guy do something to you?”

“The perv had his fucking hands all over her, man, that’s what. She didn’t like it.” Dylan stands right in front of me now, his face still hard. Aiden throws a disgusted look at the guy on the floor, his thumb still rubbing my elbow gently. “You were yanking me out the door, and when I looked back I saw him all up on her,” Dylan says, his voice starting to slur again. A moment later, he totters, and the rage mostly slips from his expression, replaced by the glazed over look he wore when Aiden dragged him from the house.

“I’m so—I’m so drunk,” he says, hunching over. Aiden grabs him by his tee-shirt and holds him up. With his other hand still supporting me by my elbow, he escorts us out of the house and into fresh air. When he lets us go, we both collapse to the grass, moaning. I almost don’t even notice that it’s raining.

“I’m going to pull my car up, okay? You two stay here.”

Dylan mumbles something incomprehensible in reply and rolls onto his back. I crawl closer and drop down right next to him. His eyes are closed when I let my head fall to the side to get a look at him. But then he opens them and looks right at me in a drunken daze.

“Thank you,” I whisper, barely moving my fingers to touch them to his. He gives the smallest of nods then closes his eyes again and curls into a fetal position in the opposite direction. I watch the raindrops hit his cheek.

A minute later, Aiden’s head appears above us. I see it as a silhouette, blocking out the stars. He starts laughing.

Squinting up at him, I slur, “Whasso funny?” Aiden keeps laughing, and I swat at him, hitting nothing but air and rain.

“You two are funny,” he finally answers. “Lying in the wet grass like it’s a Tempur-Pedic mattress.”

“Better than Temprepedemattrss,” Dylan mumbles.

Aiden chuckles. “C’mon, let’s get you to the car.” He helps me up first, and once I’m in the passenger seat, all buckled in, I rest my forehead against the glass and watch him drag Dylan by his arms across the grass.

“Geroff me,” Dylan grumbles as Aiden straps him into the backseat and shuts us both inside. “He’s such a bastard,” Dylan mutters as Aiden walks around to the driver’s side. I track Aiden through all the rain-streaked windows.

“He’s your best friend,” I mutter back, flicking damp grass from my dress.

“Yeah, well, one of these days, he’s gonna stop coming around.”

I look back at Dylan then, slumped in his seat, staring down at his hands with a wretched expression. And I can see in the bend of his lips, the pull of his brows, the emptiness in his eyes that he’s not much different than I. He, too, knows that one day, the people he cares about will want nothing to do with him.

“You’re
his
best friend, too,” I say anyway before Aiden opens the driver’s side door and climbs inside, shaking water from his hair. He glances back at Dylan, who now pretends to be passed out, and then to me with a small smile before starting the car and taking off.

When we’re almost home, Dylan, who’s been silent the whole ride, suddenly slurs, “I’m not ready to go home.”

“Where do you want to go then, buddy?” Aiden asks.

Without pause, Dylan answers, “Swing set.”

The two of them share a look in the rearview mirror. Me, I have no clue what the “Swing Set” is. A bar? A strip club? I mean, these
are
two teenage boys we’re talking about…

Forty minutes later, we’re standing outside the car, rain pouring down around us, squinting off into the night at, in fact, an actual swing set perched fifty yards away.

“Okay, so you guys were for real,” I say then bite my bottom lip as I take in the sky. “Why do I have a feel”—I sway on my feet—“a feeling we’re gonna die tonight?” A malicious branch of lightning pierces the sky right at that moment, underscoring my point.

“It’s fine,” Dylan assures me, starting forward, but I’m not reassured in the least, especially when the assertion comes from a drunk teenager. Regardless, I follow them across the grass lawn toward the swing set. A large, abandoned house stands a little ways away, and I can tell the swing set is some dilapidated remnant of a once happy family.

Broken shingles swing back and forth from the rooftop in the wind. As we pass by the house, its shattered windows allow a glimpse into its shadowy depths. A chill passes through me as I peer inside and catch sight of its dusty, cobwebbed interior. Lightning flashes across the sky again, followed nearly immediately by a blast of thunder that rattles the windows and sends some pieces of glass tumbling to the rickety porch below.

I jump. “What’s this place?” I move closer to Aiden. It’s evident he and Dylan come here quite a bit.

“A haunted house.” There’s no jest in Aiden’s tone when he says it. Both he and Dylan stop walking and turn around to appraise me. “Or so the rumor goes.”

Dylan starts laughing at my gaping mouth, and he flings an arm around me, which throws us way off balance. We barely catch our footing.

“Don’ worry cousin…In all our times here, never seen a ghost.” He squeezes my shoulder and breaks away, his feet sloshing through a mud puddle as he crosses the grass. Subsequently, he trips and nearly face plants into another mud puddle.

I smirk at him. “I think a ghost’s to blame.”

Dylan frowns back at me, seriously considering my theory, as he unsteadily rises to his feet.

The three of us make it to the swing set with no further casualties, and with our clothes completely soaked through by the time we sit down upon the old worn swings, me in the middle and Aiden and Dylan on either side. I grasp the metal chain, thinking fleetingly how stupid we are to be clinging to metal in a lightning storm, and discard my shoes so I can kick the water puddle that grows beneath my bare feet.

“So, really,” I shout, flinging my hair out of my eyes as I start to swing a little higher, “What is it with this place?” They share a look as they, too, push further off the ground.

“It’s kind of been our place for a long time,” Aiden finally admits, loud enough to be heard over the storm.

“Aww,” I tease. “You two have a spec”—
hiccup
—“a special place together. So cute.” That earns me glares from the both of them.

“We came across it when we were twelve, and no one has done anything with it since…So we just keep coming.”

“And you…swing, or what?” My hiccups start to come double-time.

They laugh. Aiden says, “No. I mean, yeah, we do a lot. But this is where we come up with a lot of our songs. It’s easier to think out here.”

I can see that. We’re in the middle of nowhere, outside a house long abandoned, surrounded by rolling hills and vineyards, feeling everything Mother Nature throws at us.

“So you come here a lot?”

They’re silent for a while. I listen to the rain falling fast to the ground all around us, and then Aiden speaks. “It’s kind of where we’ve come up with some of our best songs. So, yeah, we do.”

We swing for ten minutes before Dylan leaps off at the top of his arc and lands in a crouch in the sopping wet grass below. Muddy water splashes up around him and splatters his clothes. He stands up with a goofy grin that slowly flips downward.

He says something that I don’t quite catch over the pouring rain, but it sounds like, “I hate her.”

For a second I think he’s talking about me and possibly forgetting that I am, in fact, right here. My grip tightens on the swing chains when he kicks the grass and shouts it now.

“I hate her so fucking much!”

I don’t want to admit it, but his words cut me a little. I thought...I don’t know, that maybe we were making progress…

“Let’s dance,” he says in a complete 180˚.

Aiden glances at me with a big grin before he jumps off his own swing, and I follow with some hesitation, taken aback by Dylan’s sudden change in sentiment. The mud squishes between my toes and I fall forward, unable to help the laughter that bubbles forth from the feeling. Dylan has already taken off far across the yard and does a move that resembles a very poor split leap, over and over again.

“I hate her!” he shouts. He’s barely audible over the torrents of rain, but I can hear that.

“Hates a strong word!” Aiden bellows back. He stands close by me, just out of reach.

“I hate her!” Dylan repeats. I almost want to laugh at the contrast between his angsty words and his lively movements.

“Who is he screaming about?” I ask Aiden. He stares off at Dylan, who’s still confessing to the sky his loathing for this girl, who I’m now fairly certain is not me.

“Jessica,” Aiden answers, not looking at me.

I study his profile. Water streams down the slope of his nose and drips from his lips. He doesn’t seem eager to explain more, but still I ask, “Who’s Jessica?”

He doesn’t respond. Instead, just as a clap of thunder rocks the earth, he curves his hands around his mouth in the direction of Dylan and shouts, “I kissed your cousin!”

Instantly, I slap a hand over his mouth to shut him up, but he just laughs. Dylan stops running around to cock his head at Aiden, an oblivious expression on his face.

“What’d you say?” he shouts back, a hand cupped around his ear. A flash of lightning brightens the sky for a split second.

“He’ll kill me!” I hiss.

But when the subsequent rumble of thunder rolls through, Aiden pushes me away and once more shouts, “I kissed your cousin!” Then a second later, adds, “And I liked it!”

I leap at him again, frantically waving my arms. He takes off at a run and I chase him, intent on tackling him to the mud. A peek back at Dylan verifies that my cousin still didn’t hear a word Aiden said; in fact, he looks more confused than ever.

“What?” he shouts again.

“Aiden,” I warn.

“Never mind!” Aiden calls out and tosses a cheeky grin over his shoulder at me.

Dylan shrugs and goes back to spinning and dancing ridiculously in the rain. Out of breath, I give up on chasing Aiden and lean over my knees, sucking in air as I wipe the rain from my lips. Aiden ambles over but stays at least five feet away.

“Is your conscience cleared now?” I ask him.

“Yeah, actually. Feels great.” He spins in a slow circle with his hands outward, catching the rain. “Honestly, it was eating away at me a little, lying to him by omission. Now it’s off my chest, and he can’t say I didn’t tell him.”

“Aren’t you a sly one.”

Aiden stops spinning and stares right at me. “You should try it.”

I shoot out a breath, unamused. “Why?”

He shrugs. “Why not? It feels great.”

A lone laugh slips from my lips, but I register the challenge in Aiden’s eyes—he doesn’t believe I’ll do it—and for some reason I feel an urge to prove that he really doesn’t know me at all. With another glance at Dylan, who is paying absolutely no attention to me, I toss my arms out to the side.

“I made out with your best friend!” I shout.

“
And
you liked it,” Aiden urges. I roll my eyes at him.

“And I liked it!” I shout. “Happy?”

He grins at me, his mouth a little crooked, his eyes a little wide, impressed, I think, that I actually said it out loud, let alone screamed it.

“Is your conscience cleared now?” he asks.

I turn to head back to the car. “I have no conscience.”

Aiden catches up to me and holds me back. Low in my ear, close enough that it sends a shiver over the skin of my arms, he says, “Regardless, it feels good to admit things out loud, doesn’t it? Even if we’re cheating a little.”

“It’s better than telling a priest, that’s for sure,” I say, remembering how distraught I was before my First Reconciliation, terrified that God was going to smite me the second I uttered the first sin on my list, or smite me the second he realized I forgot to confess some of them.