Kiss the Stars (Devon Slaughter Book 1) (9 page)

Fuck.

“Or a bad case
of amoebas,” he says. “You gotta see a doctor.”

“I’ve
got
to find my girlfriend.”

I tell him about
Enid and he takes me to her casa, ready with the key, in case she doesn’t
answer, which I appreciate. But Enid comes to the door looking fresh and
rested, in a red and yellow sundress. Her hair is wet. I want to strangle her. “Where’s
Zadie?” I say.

“Oh, my God,
Devon,
baby
.” Enid acts so concerned and innocent. “You look like hell,”
she smiles.

I shove her
aside and scan the room, go into the bathroom. I know it’s pointless. Zadie isn’t
here. I hope to God she’s with one of the guys. Just so long as I find her.

But she’s
nowhere.

Enid claims she
left Zadie with her friends who are already gone, on the ferry back to the
mainland. In San Jorge, officials catch up to them. Zadie doesn’t get off the
boat. Enid’s friends say she was on the beach when they saw her, last night.

Enid gets
serious, as if just comprehending the reality of the situation. I’m sweating
like a whore in church and the
policia
are starting to look at me with
suspicion. I’m grateful when Enid takes charge.

Hours, or days,
blur into one another and I’m losing my shit, burning with fever. Somewhere in
the midst of an evening rain shower, Zadie’s dress washes up on shore and I’m
the one who finds it.

I sink to my
knees, before passing out and falling into darkness.

DAYLIGHT CREPT
under the curtains. Something heavy pressed down on me.

Devon’s arm
.

Last night was
torture. To be so close to him, to feel the warmth of his body, his hands on
me, working me into a delirium of shivers, only to have him stop suddenly, as
if I was nothing but a toy to fondle.

I rolled away,
thinking he would wake up. He didn’t. He hugged the pillow instead of me. I
studied him in the semi-dark. Like always, my breath caught. He’d been in a bad
way last night. I thought I should let him sleep but not for his sake. I was
afraid when he woke, he would leave. And I couldn’t bear it.

He didn’t stir,
not even an eyelid.

I
dressed
without turning on the light. I shimmied into a black sweater dress, black lace
panties, and pink tights. I slipped my watch over my wrist and tip-toed out of
the room, closing the door behind me. It made a hushed click.

Downstairs, I
opened the curtains. The sun melted through the clouds.

In the bathroom,
I washed my face and applied a dusting of powder over my freckles. I lined my
eyes in black and tried to comb through my tangled hair. I felt tired, almost
sore, like I was running a low-grade fever. Devon had probably given me the
flu.

When the phone
rang, I raced to answer it. My hand shook when I lifted the receiver. “Hello?”
I whispered.

“Ruby.” It was
Henry.

“
Oh
. Hi.”

“What are you
doing?” he said.

“Um…what am I
doing?”

There was a long
pause, like it was still my turn to talk. My mind reeled. I didn’t know what to
say.

“Why are you
whispering?” he said, eventually.

“No reason,” I
spoke louder, glancing toward the doorway.

Another long
silence followed.

At last, he
said,
again
, “What are you doing?”

“Right now?” I
said.

“Or maybe just
before you answered the phone.” I could hear his smile.

I frowned,
wondering if he was making of fun of me. I imagined Georgie standing beside
him, trying to stifle a giggle. My gaze swept across the room to the bookcase. “I
was in the middle of reading Proust,” I said. “
Du côté de chez Swann…
”

“Oh, wow. In
French?”

“Absolutely.”

“I flunked out
of French,” he said. “Forget about pronunciation. I couldn’t even ask someone
to go to bed with me, which is the first thing everyone learns, right?”

I thought I
heard movement upstairs and held the receiver away from my ear to listen.

“Ruby?” Henry
was saying. “You still there?”

“I’m here.”

“Listen, you
want to get coffee? I could pick you up.”

“Right now?”

He made a funny
noise, like he was muffling a guffaw and I imagined him snorting with laughter
as he relayed our conversation to Georgie. I was glad I’d lied and told him I
was reading Proust.

“Uh—so, coffee?”
he said. “Yes, no, maybe?”

I twisted the
phone cord. “I can’t.”

I felt a stab of
regret. Being asked out by Henry Thorne had once been my biggest fantasy. But
that was before I caught him and Georgie laughing about me in the teacher’s
lounge. And it was before Devon.

I wondered if
fantasies only came true after you didn’t want them anymore.

* * *

I made coffee
and heated a chocolate croissant. Sitting at the kitchen table, I sipped and
ate, while reading exams.

The girl who
left early wrote: “Being a woman, I find it personally insulting and typically
male that the narrator believed Annabel Lee had ‘no other thought’ than him.
After the first stanza, I knew we were dealing with an unreliable narrator,
i.e. psycho.”

I circled
unreliable and wrote,
interesting
.

“When I read the
part about how he thought the heavenly angels coveted his and Annabel’s love, I
wanted to laugh so hard, I was afraid I would end up crying and that scared me
a little, like I might get the creeping creepies just from reading the poem.
This I experienced all before the whammy of a climax where the narrator claims
a ‘wind’ (faaaart!) ‘blew out of a cloud’ and killed his love. Seriously, I
heard this clanging music in my head and had the sensation of witnessing a
bloody stabbing in someone’s shower. I liked the movie better.”

I put an
exclamation mark in the margin.

“So. In
conclusion, this is truly an infectious read, like an STI. Oh yeah, and to
answer your question, duh, the guy was definitely obsessed. That’s putting it
kindly. Maybe I’m not the best audience for this poem, since I just broke up
with someone who was saving stray pieces of my hair and skin. I could go on but
it would be too gross, like the poem. Suffice it to say, love bites.”

I underlined ‘creeping
creepies’ and wrote,
Nice Use Of Alliteration
. At the bottom of the
page, at the end of the essay, I scrawled C+ and drew an arrow to the next
page, where I wrote: Full of passion and compelling ideas that prove nothing,
not even that you actually do hate love. Do you believe all love is obsessive
and therefore, should be hated? If so, you need to tell me that in the intro,
prove it and tell me again at the end when I am ready to believe you. An easier
essay to write would be simply to prove to me that the narrator of the poem was
obsessive. You might get an A. If you want an A+ then you have to make me hate
love too. As it stands, I believe love can, and WILL, make the world a better
place.

It took several
hours to finish grading the senior essays. My shoulders were tight when I was
done. All of the assignments had one thing in common. They were a mess.
Apparently, the seminar I’d given on the five paragraph essay had not been
inspiring.

I made more
coffee and listened for signs of life from Devon. I envied people who could
sleep like the dead.

My first
roommate in college enjoyed sleeping a lot. She treated it like a sport. When
she’d turn off the lights at ten p.m., I’d read under the covers with a
flashlight, which drove her nuts, (before she passed out cold). “For the love
of
God
,” she’d say, like I was ruining her life. “Why don’t you have an
iPad?”

But I saw
flickering shadows and shifting shapes behind computer screens, as if they
contained gateways to secret worlds. Computers gave me vertigo, the same as if
I was on the roof of a skyscraper and lured by the idea of jumping into thin
air.

I wrote all my
papers by hand and went to the library to type them up as fast as I could. I
never told my shrink about my phobia because I knew he would force me to
confront it.

Again, I thought
of scheduling an appointment with Dr. Ess. I checked my watch. It was nineteen
past one. On a Saturday. I’d have to use his answering service.

The problem was,
if I saw Dr. Ess, I couldn’t tell him about Devon. He would say I was in danger
of developing an unhealthy obsession. And I didn’t want him to get in my way.

I gazed out the
kitchen window. Drops of moisture clung to my grandmother’s roses. Would Dr.
Ess believe me if I told him I’d conjured Devon’s likeness perfectly, down to
the shape of his lips?

I cocked my
head, thinking I heard movement above me but it was just the old house
shifting. I decided to check on Devon and trailed my hand along the banister as
I went up the stairs.

Hovering outside
the bedroom, I listened. When I heard nothing, I opened the door slowly. The
floor groaned as I walked across it. Devon didn’t wake.

Standing by the
bed, I stared at him. My heart fluttered. I reached out and touched his cheek.
When he didn’t move, I leaned down and pressed my mouth to his. I swooned at
the feel of his lips on mine.

Was he
breathing
?

I pulled the
covers back to look at his jeans that I’d unbuttoned. I slipped my fingers
beneath his waistband and closed my eyes. My face got hot. My eyes snapped
open.

Why didn’t he
wake?

I backed away.

Outside in the
hall, my grandmother’s huge house felt suddenly small, as if the walls were
closing in. I wanted to run downstairs and put on a record, something loud to
drown out the feeling of terror building inside me.

Instead, I went
to the end of the hall where there was a door I never used. My palms sweated. I
wiped them on my dress and lifted the latch.

Reaching above
me, in the dark, I swung my hand, looking for the string to trigger the light.
Spider webs stuck to my fingers. I gasped and found the string and yanked. A
bare bulb sputtered on.

I went up the
narrow staircase, as if compelled by an unseen force. I didn’t
want
to
find out. And yet, I kept going, driven by a perverse need to uncover the
distant memory that had started to beat against the edges of my mind, like moth
wings.

The attic was
large with slanted ceilings, lit by the afternoon light coming through the long
windows to the west. Built-in bookcases lined the north and south walls and two
diamond shaped windows faced east.

In the middle of
the room my four poster bed was shrouded in a mosquito net, rigged up by me,
for the days when I pretended I was in Africa. The fights between my mother and
Javier had begun by then, and Africa was as far away as I could imagine.

And yet, the
dust floating in the last rays of sunlight, the lemony smell of old floor
polish and the few books left on the shelves, comforted me and reminded me of a
time when I had felt safe. The attic had been my refuge. When my grandmother
came in from some exotic place, resting up for her next adventure, I’d put on
plays for her, changing costumes behind the red Venetian screen.

But now the
attic was a tomb of buried memories and hidden artifacts. My gaze landed on a
chest pushed against the wall.

I had trouble
unfastening the buckles. My hands shook. At last, the soft leather straps fell
away. When I lifted the lid, I was surprised by the clean aroma of cedar. I’d
been expecting the stench of decay.

I sat on the
floor. It was hard to match the heaviness in my heart with the items in the
chest.

On top lay a
white wedding dress. I took it out, holding it to my face. It smelled of cedar
and Shalimar. It was a simple dress, adorned only with lace at the collar and
sleeves.

I imagined
standing at the altar with Devon. Sunlight came through red stained glass
windows. He lifted my veil and had to bend down to kiss me.

I’d only
discovered my mother’s wedding dress, after she died. I’d laid it back inside
the chest. Now I was gripped by the need to feel its silky smoothness against
my skin. I was in a hurry, for some reason. I tore off my scratchy sweater
dress and my tights.

There was no
mirror in the attic, which wasn’t a bad thing. I twirled across the dusty floor
in my bare feet. The long skirt flew out and rustled against my skin, like cool
water. My mother was so much taller than me; the dress dragged the floor when I
walked.

I went back to
the chest and sat next to it.

The next thing I
pulled out was an ivory napkin edged in white lace. I refolded it and put it
away. There was a set of English Bone China trimmed with pink roses. I found a
flat wooden box, intricately carved.

Knives glinted
against black velvet. When I touched the gleaming points, my pulse raced.

One knife was
missing.

I closed the box
and slid it away from me, across the floor. I dipped my hand back into the
chest. I ran my finger along the rims of crystal glasses. I took out a flute
and held it up. My mother’s name had been etched in curling letters.
India
.

I searched for a
glass with my father’s name. I examined every plate and cup and saucer. There
was no trace of him.

Nestled in the
lap of a linen tablecloth, I discovered a silk pouch. I emptied it. A gold
locket slid into the palm of my hand. I opened it and found it bare.

Anger flared in
the pit of my stomach. Despite the beautiful things my mother’s hope chest
held, it was as empty as her locket.
Hopeless
.

I had nothing
from her. Not even a picture of my father. She called him the ‘sperm donor’ but
I believed he was a real person who would have loved me, if he’d been given a
chance.

I stalked across
the floor. Dread churned in my gut. The lowering sun cast pink swaths on the
floor.

Standing by the
bed, I drew aside the mosquito net and stirred dust. I sneezed. I stroked the
white chenille bedspread and breathed in the faint scent of soap. I felt as if
I had opened a sealed time capsule. I had an urge to lie down and take a nap.

But I had to
finish what I’d started.

I got down on my
hands and knees to look under the bed. It was right there, at my fingertips—my
suitcase from the sanitarium. I grasped the handle and pulled it out, an old
midnight blue Samsonite, a hand-me-down from my grandmother.