The Stars Will Shine (33 page)

I just want to be happy.

Instead of going straight back to the Kyler’s, I stop at a gas station for some cigarettes then ask Amber to meet me at Miles of Vinyls.

Her blue eyes glitter in the headlights of her car as she takes a seat next to me on the curb outside. Crossing her hands in her lap, she looks over at me.

“So,” she starts, “my guess is that you need some advice.”

I raise an eyebrow at the ground, nodding slowly as I pull a cigarette from the pack. “You could say that.” I sigh when I turn to her. “Amber, I want to apologize first, for how I left things with you and Trevyn. I was going through some stuff, and Trevyn was right, it was affecting my work and my relationships with the people I care about.”

Amber fiddles with the laces of her shoes, nodding slowly to what I say then shaking her head when I hold out the pack of cigarettes to offer her one.

“I said things to Trevyn”—I duck my head a little as I dig the lighter out of my pocket—“maybe he told you—terrible things that I didn’t mean. Things about him and you and your relationship. It was stupid of me, and I wish I could take them back, but I can’t. They’re out there forever.” The cigarette feels strange between my lips, even unlit. I don’t really want it there, but still, I inhale softly as I light it.

“I know, Delilah, and, believe me, I understand how you feel—” Amber pauses as I cough, unable to handle the smoke, but I hold on, forcing myself to feel the lightness, the floating, the blanket coming over my lungs—“probably more than you think.” She doesn’t comment on my smoking even though I can tell she’s concerned I’m doing it. “But the thing is, you weren’t completely wrong, you know. There
is
a
lot of stuff that Trevyn and I still need to discuss before we can fully move on together. And you pointing it out just made it clear we needed to do it sooner rather than later.”

“Can I ask you something?” I find myself saying, my voice almost as quiet as the night.

She turns to me and touches my arm. “Of course.”

I look down, hazy in thought, watching the thin trail of smoke float upward from the end of the cigarette that dangles between my fingers. “You and Trevyn have known each other practically your entire lives.” The two of them have always been quiet about their past, but Amber nods kindly to let me know I can go on. “When did you fall in love with him?”

Amber lets out a long sigh, and at its end, a self-deprecating chuckle. “I guess…” she says, ruminating as she looks out at a row of trees, black forms in the night. “Honestly, I’ve always loved him. But I don’t think I was able to acknowledge the fullness of my love for him until I went away.” A guilty pang in my chest reminds me of the way I taunted Trevyn with probably one of the most painful days of his life by bringing up her departure. “Over time and with age we changed and grew, and with it so did our love. You know, we weren’t always together. Not until college.”

“Really?”

She laughs. “Really. In our youth, we dated a number of people before we dated each other, and we both thought, at some point, that we were in love with one of those people.”

I once thought that, too. With Tommy. My heart aches as I relive those moments when I thought he was my everything. How my feelings for him soared way beyond anything I’d ever felt before. But how foolish it turned out to be. Could I ever again trust someone enough to give them such a large part of me? Especially someone like Aiden, for whom my feelings dwarf whatever I felt for Tommy? Would I only be setting myself up for disaster? In a gut-wrenching rush, I break from my reverie to find Amber studying me carefully. I take another drag of my cigarette then toss it to the ground with a grimace and grind it out with the sole of my shoe.

“It is true, I think, that there are underlying commonalities in all forms of love,” Amber ponders, “but that how we perceive love is also subjective. When we’re young, we only know it to be romantic feelings with a depth and intensity we’ve never yet experienced…always a case of ‘I never knew true love until you.’”

I move some gravel with the toe of my shoe. “Do you think Trevyn is the only one for you?”

“I think it’s foolish to believe that out of all the people in the world at any given time, there is only one person you could ever truly love. But I think when you find someone that completes you, and you complete them, you should hold on tight and never let them go.”

“Is that why you came back?”

She lowers her eyelids, and I know the sensation she must feel—her heart squeezed by an invisible fist. “I was still young, you know. I’m still young now, but now I know what I want. We got engaged before we graduated college, but I was still discovering myself, and so was he. I’d joined a photography club on campus, and it spoke to me in ways I never understood before. It brought out another side of me, one that longed to travel and capture art and culture in its purest forms. Trevyn, too, had his dream: starting this vinyl shop. And I couldn’t have been more supportive of that, but I needed to follow my dream, too. As much as it hurt us to let each other go, he understood why I had to do it. And at the time, he also understood that by letting me go, I might never return.”

“But you did come back.”

“Yes.”

Heartbeats later, I ask, “Why?”

She smiles at me. “I realized that Trevyn made my passions complete. I experienced so much while living abroad, met so many wonderful people, saw so many extraordinary places, but I found myself wanting to share them with
him
.”

I remember the way their faces lit up when Amber walked into that stockroom so unexpectedly to see Trevyn again for the first time in a year.

“I think sometimes we just have to give love a shot,” she says. “Living life and your dreams are important, but when you’ve found something good, you should be able to make it a part of your passions.”

I touch one of the bruises Tommy left on my wrist the other night. “I like Aiden,” I admit quietly.

She gives me a knowing smile. “It’s not hard to see.”

“It’s just, I’ve been hurt in the past. It’s hard to let myself be vulnerable in that way again.” But even as I say the words, I know that just as I held out hope for Tommy all those years back only to be crushed by him time and again, Aiden held out hope for me, and I crushed him, too.

“Aiden’s not the hurting type.” Amber’s voice is gentle when she says it. I don’t tell her that maybe I
am.

“But it’s like you said,” I go on, seeking excuses instead, “I’m young…I don’t know what love is, not really. I like Aiden—a lot—but what if I’m just blind in it like before?”

“I think you should give him a chance, Delilah. If it works, it works. If it doesn’t…Well, then it’s another experience to learn from. To learn what you really want. You have years ahead of you; if it doesn’t work with Aiden, there will always be someone else out there for you.”

I stare into the headlights of her car until my eyes ache.

Amber touches my shoulder gently. “If you never live, you’re guaranteed to pass up something great. If you never love, the same.”

***

Aiden’s parents’ house is simple and small. A pomegranate tree stands in the center of their yard, and a brick walkway, lined with white and yellow flowers, leads to the front door. All the lights are off except for one. A shadow moves across the window of the illuminated room, but the blinds are closed, so I don’t know if it is Aiden or one of his parents.

I decide to take a chance. If I don’t do this now, I might never have the courage.

With a few light taps on the window, the blinds move upward, folding in on themselves to reveal Aiden’s face. He does a double take then peers warily at my face through the glass. I motion for him to slide up the window, and he does so after a lengthy hesitation that has me seriously second-guessing my decision to come here.

“Delilah?” he says in disbelief when there is only air between us.

“I’m not a ghost, you know. I’m still very much alive.” I hop over the window sill into his room. He’s still eying me as though I can’t possibly be real. “I know you probably didn’t expect anyone to be knocking on your window this late at night, least of all, me.” He only nods faintly as he walks backwards and takes a seat on his bed. “But after all the times you’ve sneaked into my room, I thought it’s high time I return the favor.”

“Have you been smoking?” he asks, is face pulled in slightly.

I answer quietly, a little ashamed. “Only for the third time in my life.” I cross my arms, shifting on my feet, unable to stand the tension. “How did the concert go on Friday?”

“Good.” Aiden shoots a quick, semi-distressed glance toward his door.

“Your parents aren’t asleep?” I ask. He shakes his head.

That’s when I hear the thump downstairs, and the subsequent shouting. It’s muffled through the walls, so I can’t hear what they’re saying, but I catch a lot of pounding and angry sounds, a male and a female voice volleying back and forth.

Aiden runs a hand back and forth over his hair as he eyes the door. “It’s just something trivial.”

My tone turns serious when I step toward him. “That doesn’t sound trivial.”

“Believe me, when it comes to each other, they blow everything out of proportion. I wouldn’t be surprised if my mom left her coffee sitting in the microwave and my dad went off on her for it.” Looking at Aiden now, he seems so different from the Aiden I’ve known all summer. More despondent, more tired. It kills me to think I might have had a part in that.

His bed is nicely made up with white sheets and a gray comforter folded over the bottom three-quarters of it. But it looks like he hasn’t slept in it in days.

I move closer to stand in front of him. “Aiden.”

He looks up at me so warily it breaks my heart a little. I reach for his cheek with my fingers, but he pulls away and drops his eyes. I look over his shoulder to the wall a ways behind him. A dull blue shade, a color so wrong for him. He should be something vivid and energetic, a color as contagious as his personality and his smile.

“I can’t really do this right now,” he says, looking at his door again. The argument downstairs grows in volume.

I faintly hear his mother shout, “Don’t fuck your whore in this house! Not where our son lives!”

“You should go,” Aiden says, standing and crowding me so that I have no place to move but backwards.

He’s forcing me out. Quickly.

And it feels final.

He doesn’t look at me as I climb back through his window. “Bye, Delilah.”

The sound of glass breaking somewhere in the house is the last thing I hear.

“Bye,” I whisper after he shuts the window and drops his blinds.

***

Days pass with no word from Aiden.

There is only one week and a couple days until the first day of school, and apparently I’m all set to go. At the beginning of summer, when Dad was all too eager to send me off, he enrolled me at Sonoma Valley High School and promptly had my transcripts sent over.

I wonder if Aiden and I will share any classes. It’s likely, I think, given that the school is even smaller than my last one and Aiden seems like the type to glean decently good grades, as I have.

There’s a jolt in my stomach at the thought of walking into a classroom to find that the only seat remaining is one next to him, then sitting down beside him only to receive a menacing glower.

Or worse, the total silent treatment—the kind with which he doesn’t even grant me
any
expression on his face to convey what he wants to say to me. I would rather he hate me outwardly—yell at me, cuss me out, make a fool of me—for treating him how I did than act like we never even knew each other.

That’s the great fear that has me speeding down the bumpy road to the ballpark. Fortunately, after the last time I attended his team’s game, he added their remaining games into the calendar on my phone as a hint that he’d be totally cool with me showing up again sometime.

Let’s hope he doesn’t regret doing that when I show up now.

The game is almost over.

I wait in my car as I watch the pitcher of the other team strike out one of Aiden’s players for the final out. After that, it is twenty minutes before everyone has cleared out.

Aiden, however, still sits in his team’s empty dugout. The ballpark lights begin to click off, and the night sweeps in, blanketing the field in gray. Still watching from the shield of my car, I wait for him to come to the parking lot, every second the firing frequency of my neurons mounting.

Will he turn me away?

Five minutes pass, and he still sits there, bent over his knees as if the dugout is some feeble shelter he’s crawled into to wait out a storm.

The digital clock on my dashboard turns to 9:02 p.m., the numbers bright green in the dark, holding my vision to them as if to force into my head that now is the time—there is no better time than now to say what I have to say.

With a pounding heart, I get out of my car and lock it behind me. The blowhorn sound blasts into the empty parking lot and echoes around me. Aiden’s head lifts, and I can’t tell for sure, but I think his face turns to me from the shadows. I wonder if, from this far away, he knows it’s me.