Lost Stars (11 page)

I would have been perfectly happy to view the eclipse in my normal state of mind—​not that that was particularly normal,of course—​but Tommy had scored some acid, a harmless-looking sheet of purple tabs with white roses on them, smaller than stamps.

Tommy handed out the tabs. “Let it dissolve on your tongue,” he said, eyebrows raised and a hint of smile that I guessed was some attempt at wooing me but which only made me stare at my shoes.

I did not want to do it. I tried so hard not to do it. And when I did it, I vowed I would never do it again, and I had kept that vow. But that night I kept saying, “Nothing's happening, nothing's happening,” until, slowly, those shoes began to blur. Then the stone walls began to breathe.

Behind me, Greta started having a freak-out, cowering and shaking, and it seemed like every single boy there rushed to her side, one patting her hand and one stroking her hair and one kissing her gently on the cheek until she turned her face to kiss his mouth. That was usually the part where I sank into myself, shrank into a ball of jealousy and self-pity and confusion—​where, oh, where was
my
boyfriend?—​but that day I didn't. I could feel the shift begin above me, feel the moon pulling around us toward the path of the sun. I looked up, away from the spectacle of Greta and her pawing, gnawing suitors, away from Soo rubbing the breathing wall with her fingers and Tommy dancing with himself. I looked toward the darkening sky. I watched as the moon and sun collided, a black spot in the sky surrounded by a thin band of fire, and in that magical instant I could feel Ginny around me. Matter is always matter. Every cell, every molecule that made up her person was still here on Earth, or at least in Earth's atmosphere, or at least in our galaxy, or in our beautiful and mysterious universe of galaxies, or vanished into the oppositional gravity of a black hole. Nothing mattered here on Earth. Nothing mattered but the stars, my real friends, the source of all life and inspiration. In that moment, that seven minutes and thirty-one seconds of eclipse, my face turned toward the enormous rock in the sky and the source of all light mixed together, I felt completely at peace. There was no life and no death, and Ginny had never existed and always would. All the answers to the questions of life on Earth were in the stars above us, and I loved them as much as I'd ever loved anyone.

“Beautiful morning, isn't it?” asked Lynn, who had wandered up without making a sound. He sat down next to me and offered me a carrot stick.

“I'm good, thanks,” I said. “I really overdid it on the carrot sticks yesterday. They're going right to my thighs.”

He let out a small laugh as he opened a pint of milk and drank it down like a kindergartner.

“What do you think of that thing?” he asked, nodding toward the crazy-looking calcium deposit.

“Half beautiful, half hideous,” I said, sort of describing myself. “Did you know that some supernovae are full of calcium?”

“I hate to say it, but I don't remember what a supernova is.” He crunched on his carrots. “They don't talk about that when you're getting a psychology degree.”

“An exploding star.”

“I thought they were made of gas.” He stood up and dusted off his pants.

“Most of them have every single element in the entire universe. That calcium deposit could be billions of years old—​it could be made of the stuff that was present when the Earth was born. Is that the coolest, or what?” I figured with Lynn—​himself not the embodiment of cool—​this side of myself was safe.

He looked at me like he was trying to fit this information in with the person he'd already decided I was.

When the rest of the crew arrived, we started working on laying down the twelve-foot planks. We were supposed to make sure they were parallel and clamp them onto the piers. And then continue for ten thousand years until they were all laid out.

“Are we going to just do this over and over and over and over?” I said to Tonya, my perpetual partner.

“Yes, that's the job.” She was chewing gum loudly, with her mouth open.

“This is the most monotonous thing I've ever experienced.”

“Believe me, it's a lot less monotonous than your whining.”

After we'd set the planks down on the piers, we were supposed to laminate them with an adhesive called Industrial Nail Gel, which Lynn cautioned us was sixteen times stronger than Krazy Glue.

“It's a kind of blue glue, so it washes off with water, but you don't want it to dry on your skin,” he cautioned us. Blue glue. Who knew it would be making a repeat appearance in my life?

Tonya and I took turns gluing and clamping and pressing until we got to the edge of the creek. “I need a break,” I said, and for once she didn't object. I sat down by the water's edge and I couldn't help it: I had those same poisonous thoughts that I'd had that day that I freaked out at the arcade. I didn't want to kill myself. I just didn't want to be alive.

“Tonya, Caraway,” Lynn called, “come get the next one, then we'll have a break.”

“Ooh, a break,” I said. “Maybe that means we'll get celery sticks and a lecture about the history of concrete.”

She tested the two planks to see if they'd set. “The history of concrete is actually pretty interesting,” she said. “Don't you remember from chemistry?”

“Were we in chemistry together?” I sat on one of the blocks and lit a cigarette and watched her shift some of the other blocks we'd hauled into the perfect spots.

“Oh my god,” she said. “You're incredible. Really.”

“What?” I smiled. “I'm joking, Tonya. I remember. Sort of.”

“And you're not allowed to smoke. And you are really bad at setting the clamp.”

“Yikes,” I said to her. “I'm not sure why they would give hammers to kids with anger management problems.”

“I don't have anger management problems,” she said, though her tone suggested otherwise.

“Then why are you here?” I asked her, sitting on the last bare pier and watching her toil, sweating profusely again from her brow and her armpits, her imitation Izod T-shirt a size too small, her shitkickers worn in as if she'd had them for seasons now. Maybe she had.

“Because it's a
job.
” She looked at me as if I were an alien. Though we were in the same grade, we were universes apart. “It's just a summer job. You know that, right? This is voluntary?” She looked at me suspiciously.

I stood up and stamped out my cigarette. “But really it's boot camp for insubordinate youth,” I said, trying to make it sort of a question or a joke in case I was wrong.

“But really it's not,” she said. “It's a training program for young people to get skills that they can use in the work force later. It's more like vocational school . . .” She squinted as she said this, as if she was trying to gauge whether I was seriously ignorant or pretending. “There just aren't that many summer jobs.”

“Right. Of course. Yeah.” I remembered Tonya's house again, the sad little bungalow with a screen door coming off at the hinges. Her grandmother had these milky blue eyes, always kind of faraway even when she trained them on you and smiled and made you feel guilty for being able to walk around and form words and feed yourself. Tonya always wanted to come to my house to play, and I always let her.

I came over and helped Tonya, testing the planks until I knew that all of them had set just right.

At lunch, I preempted Lynn's little lecture by saying, “Yes, Lynn, it's great to feel so hungry—​and to have
earned
that hunger—​and be nourished by these soap-tasting celery sticks.” And this time even Tonya laughed. I sat down next to her and the other kids at the picnic table as I realized that I'd forgotten my sandwich. She shoved her little baggie of potato chips toward me.

“Even a jerk like you should be allowed to eat something that actually tastes good,” she said. I took one. It was amazing. “Take another,” she said, shoving them toward me. I did.

We crunched away in silence and then she said, “Who do you think you'll have for pre-calc next year?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I hadn't thought about it.”

“I hope not Mr. Zentz again. We know more about math than he does.”

I stopped crunching and looked at her. “You had him for trig? What period?”

Tonya shook her head at me. “Is it possible you have amnesia?” She took the potato chips back.

“I was just joking.”

“Something is wrong with you, Carrie.” I couldn't tell if she meant it or not.

Somehow I made it through the workday, so grimy by the end that I could barely believe that there was a parallel universe in which I was going to hang out with Dean. I unlocked my bike as Tonya and some of the other kids walked by me, entranced by a discussion of future plans.

Tonya stopped in front of me. “We're going to the disco dance at Civic tomorrow night,” she said. “It's basically punk covers of disco songs. Or maybe it's disco covers of punk songs?”

“Good for you,” I said.

“You want to come?”

“Disco?” I said. “It sounds like an evening my parents would really enjoy.” Well, if I had different parents.

“It's all ages,” Jimmie said, all the sweetness of him and his skinny little body standing next to Tonya.

“Well, all my friends are over eighteen anyway,” I said, curling my lock around my bike seat.

“Yeah, but you aren't,” Tonya said. “You're in our grade.”

What could I say to that? Wise beyond my years, but still, rather depressingly, a junior-to-be. I would stay behind in our silly school while my friends scattered across the land without me, fragile comet nuclei coming apart at perihelion, undone by the sun.

“Personally, I like disco,” Jimmie said. Tonya was frowning at me.

“Sorry—​no can do.”

Tonya looked right at me and said, “Oh, well. You'll be missed.”

I finished snapping my hardhat into the bike rack. “I will?”

Tonya took her hardhat off and tucked it under her arm, her hair molded into hat-head, and she seemed perfectly content with herself. She said, “No.”

Dean picked me up. He picked me up.
My mind hiccupped over this fact. He drove that battered Jeep around the block from Mrs. Richmond's to the front of my house, parking it next to our total crapbox of a Buick Skylark that I still hadn't learned to drive. Rosie stood at the door and said, “I can't believe this is happening.”

“Shut up,” I hissed. Hundreds of times she'd seen me pile into the back of Tommy's fake-hippied BMW or Soo's Le Car or Tiger's Rabbit, but never had a young man pulled up to our front door to retrieve me for an actual date. My father sat behind us in that ridiculous flowered armchair. He didn't bother standing up. He just said, “Be home by curfew.”

“Okay,” I said, involuntarily smiling at him.

The screen door creaked as I pushed it open and walked down the steps as if this were an everyday occurrence. I had made out with strangers at the Holiday Inn, I had taken LSD, I had done disgusting things with boys before I turned fifteen, and by the end of last year, I was smoking two packs of cigarettes a week. But I had never been on a date.

Dean got out of the car and started coming up the stairs as I came down, and he sort of reached out for me but then didn't and I half smiled at him and then raised my eyebrows and I let out a little “ha.” He looked straight ahead. This was going great.

Then he, um, he opened the door for me. “That's weird,” I said, by which I meant,
Oh my god, he opened the door for me!
but somehow it came out the other way, which I realized was not particularly nice but apparently I had lost control of the sounds I was making. Then Dean got in his side and we sat in the idling car. We both just sat there. A couple of times he turned his head toward me and I thought he was going to say something. But then he didn't.

"I'm just letting the engine warm up,” he said finally.

“Okay.”

Rosie remained watching us at the door.

Dean smiled before he realized he was smiling and then he took it back and cleared his throat and put the car in reverse and backed out of my driveway. For some reason that act, pulling out of my driveway with the beautiful boy, felt like the most important thing—​or at least the most important good thing—​that had ever happened to me. Like I was stepping into, or maybe backing into, a new life.

“Will you listen to this song?” Dean asked, pushing a cassette into the tape deck. His face looked so hopeful, his eyebrows raised, waiting for my response. Oh, how I knew that feeling. My whole life, I'd been trying to get people to listen to good songs.

“Who is it?” I'd never heard it before: just the kind of slightly off-key, recorded-in-your-garage sound I loved.

“This band called the Brinks.”

“It's really good.”

“Thanks.”

“It's you?” He nodded. I listened harder to the lyrics—​
I did nothing but watch as you fell away—​
as our little town passed by, the houses closer together as we headed toward downtown. “It's really good,” I said again. “Who's it about?”

“Oh . . .” Maybe I didn't want to know. His Oregon love, waiting for him there on those rocky cliffs, or whatever it was they had out there. I was all twisted up, wanting to hear and yet dreading the story. “Just somebody from back home.”

The next song came on, the Velvet Underground's “Jesus.”

“One of the greats,” I said. “For some reason I love songs about Jesus. Is that weird?”

“It is a little bit weird,” he said. “But not Christian rock, right?”

“You don't like Christian rock? What? Let me out of the car this instant!” We both laughed, the turbulence starting to disappear from the air.