Where the Stars Still Shine (7 page)

I can’t get off his lap fast enough.

“Callie, wait.”

I don’t wait. I shove myself into my shirt and run. It takes me a couple of tries, but I locate the GREG speed-dial icon on my cell phone. As it rings, I hear Connor calling my name. Not wanting to face him, I duck behind a thick shock of sea grass that decorates a neighbor’s front yard.

“Can you come get me?” I keep my voice low when Greg answers. “Please?”

“Is everything all right?”

“I just—I want to come home.”

“Okay.” I hear his keys jingle through the phone. The immediacy of his response is reassuring. “You’re at Nick’s house, right?”

“No, um, I’m at a place called Pointe Alexis.”

“I’m not even going to ask right now,” he says. “I’ll be there in about fifteen minutes.”

After giving him the address of my sea grass hiding spot, I work out a text message to Kat, telling her I went home. I don’t want her to worry. She texts a reply, but I don’t look or answer. I slide the phone in my pocket and wait for Greg.

“Callie?” Connor’s voice is closer now. I hug my knees against my chest and make myself as small as possible so he won’t see me. It reminds me of the way I’d curl myself up, hoping Frank would mistake me for a pillow—even though nothing about this night is the same as back then—and I press the heels of my hands hard against my eyes to keep from crying. Connor’s phone chimes, and I imagine him looking at the screen—probably at a message from Kat, calling off the search. He swears softly, and his footsteps fade away as he returns to the party.

The scene between us plays on a continuous loop in my head, the humiliation catching flame on my face over and over until I’m scorched. I don’t understand
what happened, why Connor didn’t want me. And I don’t understand why I still feel every bit as worthless as I felt after Danny, after Matt. After Frank.

I stay hidden until I see a pair of headlights coming up the street and Greg’s SUV pulls into the driveway beside me.

“Are you okay?” he asks, and the concern in his voice undoes me.

I shake my head, tears creeping down my cheeks. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Callie—” Greg blows out a frustrated breath. “At least tell me if there’s some idiot up at that party I need to kill.”

“There isn’t.” The only idiot at the party was me, but I don’t tell him that. “Am I in trouble?”

“The short answer is yes.” Greg puts the SUV in reverse and backs down the driveway. “But we’ll talk about that tomorrow.”

“Relax,” Greg says the next afternoon, as we cross the front porch of an old house with faded gray shingles. It belongs to his mother, Georgia, and my stomach is wound yarn-tight at the prospect of meeting her—and apparently every member of Greg’s extended family. My homecoming and Thanksgiving combined in one belated feast. “As soon as they start eating and drinking, they’ll forget all about you.”

I smooth my palms down the skirt of the green sundress Phoebe let me borrow. I’m not used to wearing dresses and it exposes more of my legs than makes me comfortable, but it has flowers embroidered around the hem that remind me of the shirt Ancilla bought me. Phoebe also gave me a pair of sandals embellished with wooden bits and said I could keep them.

“We should go shopping tomorrow,” she said. “Living with three guys, it would be a fun change to go with another girl.”

Even though Phoebe has always known I exist, it can’t be easy to have a new person who doesn’t belong to her in her household, so I said I’d think about it. I didn’t tell her Kat has already appointed herself my personal stylist.

The age-scarred wooden front door opens and a woman with wiry dark-gray hair pushes Greg aside to get to me, enveloping me in a hug so tight I feel as if my ribs might crack. Her hair tickles my nose, but her scent—the rose soap smell—reminds me of making oatmeal raisin cookies and singing a song about the moon.

“Oh, my little Callista,” she croons softly in my ear and rocks me from side to side in a way that feels familiar. I recognize her voice. She’s my
yiayoúla
, my grandma. And while I don’t exactly remember her, bits and pieces of memories are sprinkled through my mind. Even more than Greg. “We’ve missed you so much.”

Georgia stands back to look at me—her hands clutching my shoulders—and I see my face in her wrinkles, my eyes behind her red-rimmed glasses. It’s strange to go your whole life thinking your DNA is all your own, and then see yourself in someone else.

“Come.” She drags me inside, into a living room
overstuffed with people—on couches, perched on the arms of chairs, standing in every available space—and shoves me into a circle of eyes. More people than I’ve met in my whole life are packed in this house. A baby whimpers from some other room, and a little girl about Tucker’s age says, “But I don’t
want
to meet her, Mommy.”

“Everyone,” Georgia says. “Here is our Callista, home at last.”

They all start clapping, except for the little girl, who puts her hands over her ears and sticks her tongue out at me. I try to feel as if I’m part of this, but they’re all strangers. Some of the elderly women begin to converge, but my grandmother fends them off as if she’s my personal bodyguard.

“Let the poor girl breathe,” she scolds, as if she didn’t just squeeze the wind out of me herself. Behind me Greg snickers and she shoots him a stern look, which makes me smile.

Georgia keeps her arm wrapped firmly around my waist as she introduces me to more aunts, uncles, and cousins than I’ll ever be able to remember. Some of the old ones have accents so thick they sound as if they arrived from Greece this morning. They touch my face with papery fingers. Verifying I’m really me, maybe? I’m not sure. It creeps me out, but I don’t say anything. I smile and nod and say “thank you” a lot.

“Ma.” Greg comes up with Kat at his side. I’m glad to see both of them. “Maybe it’s time to give Callie a break.”

“You’re right,” Georgia says. “And I should check on the
dolmades
. Ekaterina, you have such a pretty face. Why do you cover it up with so much makeup?”

Kat rolls her eyes, but before she can say anything, my grandmother is pushing her way through the crowd to the kitchen. My cousin links her arm through mine, and I let her lead me out the front door to sit on the porch.

“I am so hungover.” She drops onto the wooden swing, making the chain shake. “Did you get in trouble?”

“I’m grounded for a week.”

“Ouch.” She winces. “I’m sorry. My mom didn’t say anything so I assume Greg didn’t tell her.”

“He was thinking about it,” I say. “But I talked him out of it.”

“You are the best. I owe you.” She bumps her shoulder against mine. “So what happened with Connor? He came back to the party looking kind of freaked out.”

“I don’t want to talk about it.”

Her eyes narrow. “He told Nick the same thing. Did you—?”

“No.”

She pushes off with her foot, making the porch swing sway. “Then it can’t be that bad, can it?”

Fresh embarrassment blooms on my face. “I thought we were, so, um—I took off my shirt.”

“Seriously?” She stops the swing with both feet. “Wow. No wonder he freaked. I mean, I’m a little surprised he didn’t rally in the face of”—Kat gestures toward my chest—“
those
, but I think he wanted to ask you out on a date first, not go straight to hooking up.”

It never occurred to me. Not once. “Oh.”

“You didn’t know that?”

“No.”

“Wait. You’ve never had a boyfriend?
You?
”

“No.” When you don’t stay in any one place very long, there’s not much opportunity to be someone’s girlfriend. Also, not much opportunity to meet the kind of guy who wants you for anything more than sex. “I’ve only …” I trail off, but Kat picks up on what I don’t say.

“Whoa.” She sounds surprised, and I envy having the kind of naïveté that assumes if you’ve never really dated, you might still be a virgin. If I had grown up here, I might be. Or at least I wouldn’t have lost my innocence when I was eight years old. “Well.” She starts the swing again. “I think you should try again with Connor. We could double-date.”

“Maybe.” Connor will be a great catch for someone, but I’m pretty sure it’s not me. I don’t know how to be that kind of girl. He’s sweet, though. Cute.

We sit a minute and Kat starts giggling. “I wish I could have seen Connor’s face when you took off your shirt. I don’t think he’s met real live boobs before.”

“Well, he has now.”

She’s cracking up laughing when Georgia comes out onto the porch. “There you are, girls. Callista, the dolmades are ready. Come in. Try them.”

She hustles me away from Kat to the dining room, where the table is laden with a variety of Greek foods, as well as ordinary holiday fare, like turkey, cornbread stuffing, and mashed potatoes.

“Dolmades”—Georgia says, scooping an enormous portion of little green bundles onto a plate—are rice and meat wrapped in grape leaves. When you were a baby, I would feed you this and you would open your mouth the way a new bird does, wanting always more, more, more.”

As if I’m still that baby, she severs off a piece with a fork and brings it to my mouth for a bite. The rice tastes like rice, but the flavor of the leaves is minty and sour at the same time. It’s unpleasant, and I chew quickly to rid myself of the taste. I try not to let her see that I don’t care for her dolmades, but disappointment settles in her eyes and at the corners of her mouth, and I feel as if I’ve failed some secret granddaughter test.

Grandchild, daughter, friend, a girl a normal boy
would date—a growing list of people I don’t know how to be.

“Ah, well.” She smiles and she hands me a fresh plate. “We can’t stay babies forever, can we?”

I fill my plate mostly with foods I can identify and grab a can of Coke from an ice-filled plastic tub in the kitchen. As I make my way through the living room toward the porch, I hear someone say “Veronica.” In a short hallway that leads to the bedrooms and bathroom, two older women—not as old as Georgia, but definitely a lot older than Greg—huddle, talking softly about my mother. I linger close to the doorway so I can hear what they’re saying.

“Kidnapping is a federal offense,” the fat one says, with such certainty that I wonder if she’s right. “She’s going to jail for a long, long time, and I can’t say she doesn’t deserve it.”

“If you ask me, she should be committed,” the second woman says. “If it wasn’t for the crazy disease, she would have never done what she did.”

Crazy disease?

“I’ll never understand what Greg saw in that girl.”

The first one snorts. “He was thinking with his
poutsa
.”

I don’t need to understand Greek to understand what she means, and I want to tell them that it wasn’t about sex. That Greg saw what other people didn’t.
But my mind snags on the words “crazy disease,” and I remember what Ancilla said about Mom getting the help she needs. And the words the man in the leather jacket yelled after me when I ran away from him. I’ve lived with her my whole life. Wouldn’t I know if my own mother was really crazy?

I deposit my plate and soda on an end table and seek out Greg. He’s drinking a beer and talking to Theo, the cousin who runs the gift shop at the docks.

“We need to talk,” I say.

Greg looks as if he’s going to protest at first—because we’re in the middle of a party—but I guess he sees the seriousness on my face because he nods. “Sure.”

Outside on the porch, I ask, “Is my mom crazy?”

“No.”

Greg levels his index finger at me. Defensively. As if he’s had this conversation one too many times. “Veronica suffers from borderline personality disorder, Callie. It affects her moods, and can be treated with therapy and medication, but she’s
not
crazy.”

I remember an amber prescription bottle in her purse, but there were no pills in it. Just coins. Quarters fit in it just right and she’d let me put them in whenever we got change. “I never saw her take any medication.”

“You probably wouldn’t have,” he says. “Her doctor had her on a mix of antidepressants and antianxiety
medications, but she complained they turned her into a zombie. She said they made her feel as if she was made of nothing. But without the meds she’d swing from one extreme to another. One day everything would be fine, and the very next day she’d accuse me of not loving her enough and try to bait me into telling her I wanted to break up with her. She’d cut friends out of her life for no apparent reason. She’d get unreasonably angry about the smallest offenses. And she absolutely hated being alone.”

Like the last number on a combination lock, the tumblers of my life fall into place, and all the different mothers my mother has been finally make sense. The anger inside me makes my skin feel too tight and I need to get away from here. I start down the front-porch steps.

“Callie, where are you going?” Greg asks.

“I just—I’ll be back.”

My sandals are too slow, so I take them off. The sidewalk is warm as I run and I don’t mind the sharp bite of tiny stones against my soles. How could my mom be so selfish? Taking the pills would have kept us here. Taking the pills would have kept her from hooking up with Frank. All she had to do was
take the goddamn pills
and her life,
my life
, would have been ordinary. Happy.

I end up at the sponge docks. Mostly because it’s
beautiful so near the water, but also because I don’t know any other places to go. The place where Alex Kosta’s boat should be is empty, but so is the bench where I met Kat. Around me, sightseers study brochures and discuss what they want to do next. The sponge-diving tour boat pulls away from the dock with a load of tourists aboard. An old couple wearing sandals with socks take turns photographing each other in front of a bronze statue of a man wearing an old-fashioned sponge-diving suit.

I reach the bench and try to sit quietly, but my head is too loud. It takes me to the Super Wash, where the tall man with the leather jacket said Mom and I were both crazy, and a brand-new fear overtakes me. What if I
am
just like her? Is borderline personality disorder hereditary? Am I crazy, too? And if I am, how would I know for sure?