Connect the Stars (9 page)

I made an offended face. “What? You're just assuming I don't know the weather conditions in Georgia on July seventeenth of last year?”

“No!” Then he scratched his head. A Poison Ivy liar, unless he only scratched his head, which would make him a Lice Liar. I tried to remember what he'd done before, but then I realized this was the only time I'd ever heard him lie. And he took the lie back about three seconds later.
“Well, yeah, I was. Sorry. Like I said, sometimes I forget that other people know things.”

“I was
kidding
,” I said, elbowing him. “I had no idea what the weather was.”

“Oh, well, how did you know he was lying, then?”

“I knew because—” I had never told anyone about my special ability, my unsuper superpower, but I decided, right there on the spot, to tell Aaron. I don't know why. Maybe because he was so open about his own weird gift. Maybe because he just seemed like someone you could trust. Maybe because I knew I'd never see the guy after camp ended, so it didn't matter what I said to him. But really I think it had more to do with the night sky, how immense and starry it was. I know it doesn't make sense, but there was something about being under that sky with Aaron that made me want to tell him the whole truth. I took a breath. “Because my brain can do this strange thing.”

And then I told him. After I finished, he didn't say anything at first, but I could tell from his expression that he was mulling it over. I braced myself, waiting for him to spurt out some fact about the prefrontal cortex of the brain or about a world-famous pathological liar, or maybe he was even going to lie to me to see if I could detect it, but when he finally spoke, he said, “Do you ever wish people wouldn't talk about it all the time?”

“About what?”

“Your lie-detecting ability.” He smiled. “Your superpower.”

“I don't really call it that. Sometimes, to myself, I call it an unsuperpower.”

“I don't call it that either,” said Aaron, “except as a joke. But whatever you want to call it, both our brains can do strange things. I just wondered if you ever get tired of people talking about
your
strange thing.”

“Do people talk about yours a lot?”

Aaron nodded. “Sure. All the time. They're not being mean or anything; at least, most people aren't. They think it's cool. They think
I'm
cool because of it, and when they talk about it, they're, like, cheering me on. But now, for some reason, I wish they wouldn't talk about it so much.”

I thought for a second. “Well, yeah, it probably gets old being known for just that. You wouldn't want it to become your entire identity.”

Aaron's eyes clouded with confusion. “I'm not sure what you're saying.”

“You know, your amazing memory is, well, amazing. But you probably wish people saw the other interesting things about you.”

Aaron looked even more confused, as if it hadn't occurred to him before that there might be other interesting
things about him. I didn't see how that could be true, though. He was probably just tired.

“Well,
I'll
try not to talk about it a lot,” I said, nudging him with my shoulder. “And I'll definitely never call you Memory Boy.”

Aaron smiled. “Thanks.”

“Although it is a really clever nickname. Sounds like something a first grader would make up,” I said, “which isn't that surprising, since it was Randolph.”

“Right.” But Aaron didn't jump in and start talking about what an idiot Randolph was, which is what most people would have done. I figured that with the hand-washing insult, maybe he'd used up his meanness quota for the day.

“I don't get tired of people talking about my lie-detecting ability because no one knows about it,” I said.

Aaron looked at me, startled. “Seriously? Why not?”

“I guess since it's something I hate about myself, I don't feel like going around broadcasting it to everyone. Only my parents know.”

“Hold on. You
hate
it?”

“Anyone would hate it.”

“I don't know about that. I mean, I can see how it would be a problem sometimes, but it's part of who you are.”

“So?”

“So hating it seems . . . counterproductive.”

I stopped walking and put my hands on my hips, annoyed. “My so-called gift messes up my life on a daily basis. So what am I supposed to do? Just start—
poof!
—liking it? Does that sound easy to you?”

“I guess not,” said Aaron. “Sorry.”

He sounded so downcast and regretful that I felt bad about snapping at him.
Why should you feel bad?
I chided myself.
He's not your friend, remember? You don't have any friends.

Even so, I flashed back to him patiently fixing my zipper when I hadn't even asked him to.

“That's okay,” I said.

When we got back to our campsite, Kate and Louis were waiting up for us. Kate pointed and said, “Here they are!” and I noticed that she seemed less sad than usual. I thought about how maybe those companion ponies (or monkeys) weren't only helping the racehorses. Maybe taking care of the racehorses helped them too.

We filled them in on what we'd overheard.

“Do you think they're right?” asked Louis. “About heading back down the trail?”

He sounded hopeful, and I thought he was probably thinking that he might not have to hike through that dark, narrow crevice in the rock after all. But Aaron was shaking his head.

“‘Delve' comes from the Old English word
delfan
, which means ‘to dig.' It's an odd choice of words, so I think Jare must have done it on purpose. We're not just supposed to go back; we're also supposed to go
down
, into the ground.”

“Not to be negative or anything, but do you think Jare
knows
Old English?” asked Kate.

“Maybe his girlfriend or his mom or his English teacher does. Whoever wrote the clues also knows about Benedict Arnold and Dylan Thomas's poetry. He—or she—could easily know about the word ‘delve.'”

Louis shuddered but then sat up straighter. “Okay. So we'll get up tomorrow morning and go.”

“It'll be fine, Louis,” said Kate. She reached out as if to pat his arm but, as if remembering that he didn't like to be touched, stopped a few inches from it and patted the air instead. Louis gave a shaky smile, but he didn't look one bit convinced.

“Actually,” I said, “I think we should leave before morning.”

Louis's eyes widened. “You mean go in the dark?”

“Well, it would only be dark at first, before we get to the gully, and we'll use headlamps,” I said. “Look, I don't love the idea of hiking in the dark either, but Daphne's team is planning to start first thing in the morning. I bet it
won't take her that long to figure out they made a mistake. So I think we should get a head start.”

“‘We need to get out of here as soon as it's light if we want to beat Little Miss Perfect Ponytail and her band of freaks,'” quoted Aaron.

Louis and Kate stared at him. He shrugged.

“Sorry. That's just what she said,” he explained.

“Yeah, thanks for repeating it word for word,” I told him, but I wasn't really mad. Aaron was somehow a hard person to be mad at.

“Your ponytail
is
nice,” said Aaron helpfully.

Maybe we were giddy from exhaustion, but this struck us all as hilarious. When we stopped laughing, we agreed that Aaron would set his watch so that we'd be up a half hour before sunrise.

“I wear earplugs when I try to sleep, so you might need to talk extra loud to wake me up,” said Louis, climbing into his big tent. “If I sleep at all. Anyway, good night, guys.”

“Yeah, good night, everyone,” said Kate sadly. She sighed as she unzipped her tent, and I thought that nights must be especially hard for her, lying there alone with whatever it was that made her so miserable.

“Night,” I said.

“Good night,” said Aaron. Then, when the other two were in their tents, he added, quietly, just to me, “I was
thinking. Maybe you don't have to actually
like
it, your unsuperpower.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, maybe you don't have to go all the way to liking it. But remember what you said about my memory? That it doesn't have to be my whole identity? Maybe if you thought about your lie-detecting ability as just another part of who you are, like your brown hair or whatever, it wouldn't seem like such a big pain,” said Aaron.

I know I should have been irritated that this kid I wasn't even friends with was giving me advice I hadn't even asked for, but somehow all I could feel was touched. All this time, just because he wanted to, Aaron had been thinking about how to help me with my unsuperpower problem. But I realized that showing him I was touched would be a mistake—it would make him think we were friends or something. So I just shrugged.

“Who knows?” I said breezily. “Maybe.”

But that night, I stayed awake inside my tent for a long time, thinking about what Aaron had said.

I'd expected that Aaron would have to come wake us all up when his watch alarm went off, but even though I was two tents away and sound asleep, I heard it, a bright, hard, mechanical pinging, bouncing like a tiny hammer against
the soft, wide quiet of the desert night. I knew it was actually early morning, but most of my brain and my entire body thought it was still night. It was only by sheer force of will—and picturing Daphne instead of Louis sleeping on that air mattress—that I was able to drag myself up and out of my tent. But when I stood, stretched, and breathed in, the air smelled fresh and crisp and lush and alive.

I figured I was the first one to emerge, but after a moment I noticed that Louis's tent was already down, and then I saw his large, bunched silhouette against the backdrop of trees. Either he'd decided not to wear his earplugs after all or he'd been too nervous about hiking in the dark to sleep. He was sitting on his pack, and his hands were around his face. His shoulders were slowly rising and falling. I thought he might be crying.

“Louis?” I whispered his name so softly that it was more like a breath, because I knew he hated things coming at him out of nowhere, and I wasn't sure if this included his name. But he didn't jump at the sound, just turned his head in my direction and nodded. I walked over and saw that he had one hand clamped over his mouth. The forefinger of his other hand was pressed against the side of his nose, squeezing shut his right nostril.

“Oh. Do you feel like you're going to throw up?” I asked him.

He shook his head, moved his hands away, and exhaled, long and slowly, like he was blowing out birthday candles.

“I do that too, sometimes,” he said. “Throw up. I guess I still could. It's early.” He gave a shaky laugh. “But no, I was reducing my oxygen levels and increasing my carbon dioxide.”

“Because . . . ?”

“I was overbreathing,” he said. “Also called hyperventilating. But just the word ‘hyperventilate' makes me anxious, which is basically the last thing you want when you're panicking. I find the word ‘overbreathing' more calming.”

I considered this. “I can see why you would. Are you feeling . . . better?”

He squeezed his eyes shut and lifted one finger to tell me to wait, and I wondered if he was trying to look inside his own head to see if it was all finished panicking. Finally he opened his eyes and nodded.

“I think so.”

“It'll be okay, you know. It really will.”

He gave a decisive nod. “Definitely.”

And it was okay, mostly. Kate had the brilliant idea of tying two bandannas together to make a scarf about two feet long, then tying one end to her pack and giving Louis the other end to hold.

“I'll walk ahead of you,” she said. “If you get nervous in the dark, it might help to know you're connected to someone.”

Louis eked out a smile. “It'll help. I'm sure it will.”

When he said this, I met Aaron's eyes, and he smiled. I knew we were both thinking about Seabiscuit and Pumpkin; I also knew that once you started having inside jokes with people, it was really, really hard not to become friends with them. But I couldn't help it. I smiled back.

We retraced our steps from yesterday, heading back toward the gully. Because the path through the creosote bushes was narrow, Aaron went first, then Kate, then Louis, then me.

A couple of times, I heard Louis's breathing get faster, but each time he used the birthday-candle blowing to calm himself down. It didn't take us long to get to the deep cleft in the rock that we'd found the day before, and by then, the eastern sky had gone from black to smoke gray to rose. Just as we stopped hiking and stood staring uneasily into the gully, the sun popped up behind us and turned the rocks the color of pumpkin pie.

Aaron said, “Okay, how about if I go first? Then I'll yell back to let you know how long it took, and also if there's anything specific to watch out for.”

“Are you sure? I can go first,” I said, but he was already
going. The space was narrow enough so that if he opened out his arms, both hands could brush the sides of the crevice, and after about twenty feet, it curved down and away to the right. Something like two minutes went by before we heard him call out, “Through! It gets a little bit narrower for about ten steps, but then it opens up. It's brighter in there than you'd think. Don't worry, Louis. It'll be fine!”

“It'll be fine, it'll be fine,” said Louis, in a squeaky whisper, to himself.

“You got this, Louis,” I said.

Kate gave him a quick look over her shoulder. “Ready?”

“Ready,” said Louis.

The three of us stayed close together, shuffling more than hiking, Louis clutching the bandanna rope with both hands. I could hear his breathing growing shallower and shallower. Soon he was trembling so much that his pack was quaking.