Lost Stars (23 page)

“No,” my father said. “Come up here. Come up. Look.” He waved his hands.

“What?”

“Come up here already, you dork,” Rosie called. “It's your beloved comet.”

I looked up. “What? Now?” Somehow, after all this planning and calculating, I'd forgotten to keep track of Vira.

“It just crossed into the Northern Hemisphere,” my father said. “I heard them talking about it on the radio and then I came up here and looked. Come up.”

I stayed at the bottom of the stairs, my arms crossed. I couldn't seem to make myself trudge up the stairs; the force of gravity, or the gravity of fear, was too strong. It was a terrible feeling, so uncomfortable, a snake slithering through my intestines, something like nausea welling up inside me and then, crap, tears.

My father waved me over to him. “Look,” he said. “Come up here. Please.”

I walked up the stairs, sniffling, and then into Ginny's room to my telescope.

“You remember this is the least visible path of the comet in two thousand years, right?” he asked.

“Yes. Just my luck.”

“It's low on the horizon. But if you get the telescope in just the right spot, if you make really small adjustments, it'll align. I think you'll get a good view.” He tipped the telescope slightly. “See it better now?”

“Yep.” My father was staring at me, waiting for my response.

I peered up at the sky, and I saw it, the fiery tail, the white light,
a hand to your darkness, so you won't be afraid.
I stayed there for a long time, my eye pressed against the glass of the telescope until I felt it begin to bruise. Every ninety-seven years, for hundreds of thousands of years, this same rock-on-fire had sailed through our atmosphere, essentially unchanged. Or, actually, it was changing all the time. Just a rock for seventy-five and a half years and then, when it got close to the sun, all that gas and dust burst from it. Just like that, it became something else.

“It's just a ball of rock and gas,” I said as I pulled back from the telescope. “Big deal.” Then: “Just joking,” I said, drying my tears. “It's totally amazing.”

And the guy actually smiled at me.

When the phone rang, breaking the magic of the comet, I knew who it was.

“Carrie,” my mom said. “I just saw it. Did you see it?”

“Yes. I saw it.”

“I just wanted to make sure.”

“I saw it,” I said again.

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

“Are you doing astronomy club again this year?”

“That's the plan.”

A pause, during which I heard a teakettle boiling.

“Can I come on the field trip to the planetarium this year? Will you let me?”

I really wanted to say no, to deny her access to any part of my life, let alone the almost-the-most-sacred part. Three-quarters of my life was total unbearable shit, but the other quarter had started to seem pretty okay, bordering on good.

And my mouth made the word. “Yes.”

I was deep in a flying dream, lost and floating in the sky, part terrified and part awed, with Lynn's pickup truck tracking me below, when a sound made me open my eyes. The glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling had lost their light, their outline faint against the thin rivers of cracks up there. My mom had been the handy one, the one to do the home repair. The plinking started slowly at first, and then became more persistent. Finally I crawled out of bed and opened the window, sticking my head out into the cool air. It was descending into the darkest part of the night, that swirly, soothing midnight.

He was just standing there. The cutest boy in the world, who thought I was crazy. Who didn't, apparently, actually like crazy chicks.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

“Hi.”

He blinked at me. “Hi.”

“Um, hi? Is that it? Should we just keep saying hi and then I'll go back to sleep because I don't know what else to say or where you went or if you're okay or if we're, if we're, you know, if we're, I don't know, if we're—”

“Can I come in?”

“In here?”

“Yeah. Can I come up there?”

“Oh. I don't know. Yes, okay.”

“Because we are,” he said.

“We are?”

He smiled. “Yes,” he said. “We are.”

I went downstairs and let him in, forgetting that I was wearing a ratty Ramones T-shirt and too-big boxer shorts, my sleep uniform, forgetting that my house was a mess, the banister along our stairs creaky and loose, the hardwood floors worn and scratched, that embarrassing flowered chair clearly sat in for far, far too long. He didn't seem to notice anyway, and what did I care about some guy who thought I was too crazy to date? What did I care?

I cared so much.

He walked behind me as I slowly brought him up the stairs, then he reached for my hand, and it was so warm. It was so warm. But I took my hand away. I led him out my window and onto the roof.

“I didn't say that,” he said.

I pretended I didn't know what he was talking about.

“I never said that you were crazy. Especially to that guy. He likes Def Leppard.”

“I kind of like Def Leppard,” I whispered.

He scrunched up his nose. “You do? Oh, man, I don't know about you, then.”

“I know that!” I was too loud. “I realized that you were not particularly fond of me even before you knew that I think ‘Photograph' is a catchy tune. I like the Bee Gees, too. And, yeah, I'm crazy.”

“This is all that happened. Soo said that you were kind of like fancy crystal—​that I had to handle you with care—​not because you're fragile but because you're so . . .” He trailed off.

“What? So what? So crazy?”

“I don't know. So special or something. That's all she meant.”

“Special like special education?”

He sighed, frustrated or annoyed. “I said just what I said to you. I like crazy chicks. That's all I said. And Soo was just going, you know, ‘Yeah, she's pretty crazy,' but not in a mean way, like, in a way that she liked you. Carrie. Carrie, come on. Carrie. Carrie?”

He sang more lyrics to the terrible Carrie song. How when lights went down, he saw no reason for me to cry.

“Stop! Stop, I can't take it,” I said, covering my ears. He pulled my hands from them.

“I'm just scared,” he said, staring at his lap. “I'm scared, okay?”

“Why?” I could barely hear, that's how hard my heart was beating.

“I just got scared that I wasn't going to be able to handle you with care. That I'd break you. It seems like I break people. I don't know—​it was sort of what your mom said. I know what she did sucks so bad, but I worried I'd do the same thing. So I just, I thought I should stay away from you. It's kind of like if I feel too much again, even too much good . . .” He trailed off. “I just . . . I don't want to lose my mind again.”

“Well, okay.” I said. “You've found your mind, right?”

He smiled and the world was right. “Yes,” he said. “My mind and I have been reunited. I'm sorry I was an asshole. I was trying not to be an asshole, and in doing so, I became a total asshole.”

“Okay,” I said. Then I hugged him, and I loved the feeling of his long hair on my cheek, and I whispered in his ear, “Don't be scared. Please don't be scared.”

I told him I wanted him to take me somewhere, and then directed him down the Avenue of the Pines and through the parking lot and up the little dirt road that led to the geyser and its giant pile of calcium, the bright orange flowers of the jewelweed. He left a mix tape in, and we sat by the half-finished construction project.

The comet was still too low and far away for us to see without a telescope up there—​it would still be another week or so before we could see it with our naked eyes, but the Scorpius constellation gleamed above us. “What kind of star is that?” he asked, pointing to the constellation's tail.

“Probably a white dwarf,” I said. “It's a little star that forms when a bigger star collapses.”

“It's the dregs of the big star, you're saying.”

“Yes, the astronomical dregs.”

“Another band name?”

“I'm thinking no.” I had no beer to sip, nothing in my hand to hold on to.

“What kind of star is the sun?” he asked.

“That's easy—​yellow dwarf.”

“Wait—​the sun is a dwarf?”

“Yes, it's only that hot because it has a Napoleon complex.”

The music thrummed faintly, the Cure's “Boys Don't Cry,” and we were just sitting there looking up at the sky, and time evaporated or it stood still or something, and I was just so un-comfortable. I was waiting and dreading, both.

“All those stars might not even be there anymore,” I said finally, trying to fill the silence. “Do you ever think about that? They might have exploded thousands of years ago, but it takes so long for their light to travel here that we'd never know. That's old light we're looking at.”

“Yeah,” he said. “It's amazing.”

And then, I thought it was going to happen. Meteor showers and that warm soft air and his arm lightly brushing mine and the smell of jewelweed and him saying “I love this song” as the Kinks' “Waterloo Sunset” came on. It was too much. I couldn't wait anymore. He was just sitting there, his hands to himself, not even looking at me.

“What's happening?” I asked. I didn't mean to be whining, but I was. “Is something going to happen?”

He said, “Um.” That
um
seemed to last for ten minutes. Then, very quietly, “Okay. Can I kiss you?”

No one had ever asked me that before. No one had ever been so solicitous and gentle and kind. His head was moving toward mine, the hair and the tangy smell and the night. He took the lock of my hair that had fallen over my face and tucked it behind my ear and then I couldn't help it, I couldn't take it, my heart was beating so hard that I could feel it in my ears and I jumped up and ran over to his car and got in the front seat and shut the door.

Dean came over and knocked on my window, and I rolled it down.

“Um, I have a question,” I said.

“You're in luck.” His face was close to mine, even if the car door was in between us, and I could feel him getting closer.

“Why do you like me?” I asked. “And not just because I'm crazy. Or in spite of the fact that I'm crazy.”

I was stalling, just trying to find a minute to catch my breath, but he actually paused to consider the question. “Okay,” he said. “I'll tell you.”

He took my hand in his, my limp little dirty-fingernailed hand, and he looked at our hands as he talked. “I like your messy rock star hair. I love that one tooth that juts out. I like that you love astrophysics.”

It took all my energy not to evaporate from the sheer intensity of feeling; I didn't even know what kind of feeling. Just: it was too much. It was too much good.

“And,” he said, “you have good taste in music.”

The nicest thing anyone could ever say. Somehow I could exhale.

“But the truth is . . .” He stopped. He was going to tell me that he still loved a girl back in Oregon and too bad for me. “The truth is, I knew I really liked you when I saw you in those work boots with that hardhat on the back of your bike.”

Then my lips were on his. I had kissed him without even meaning to, right through the open window. I pressed my lips against his and sort of hurt my lip, and he said, “Ow,” but then he kissed me back, and he put his hand against my cheek and our mouths were too open and then too closed and then we hit the rhythm. We kissed and we kissed and we kissed. And then Dean said, “This is a stupid way to do it,” and he opened the door and took me out and leaned me against the car, and I was more on fire with desire than I'd ever been in my life. All that heat, all that light, all that white—​I felt like it wiped clean the dirty slate of the past two years of my life.

We spent what felt like hours out there by the creek, by my imperfect corner of the unfinished footbridge, kissing until my lips were so red and chapped that I could hardly kiss anymore. I'd never felt any sensation in my life better than that pain.

“I should take you home,” he said at some point, pausing to rest his head on my shoulder, to kiss me at the base of my ear. “Your dad.” He lifted his head to look at me, and I looked at him, and this was happening. This moment. We were just looking at each other. And then we kissed some more.

We drove home, his hand on mine, moving away only to shift gears. We said nothing, and didn't even put any music on the radio. When we pulled up in front of my house, all the lights were off. I had been out with an upstanding human being, who thought I had good taste in music and liked my hardhat. I kissed him and kissed him again.

For that entire week, the comet blazed,
a fireball making its way across the sky. It watched over us as we put the finishing touches on the footbridge, a glossy coat of polyurethane that had to sit for forty-eight hours before we worked on it again. We built a tent of tarps and dowels to cover the bridge so dirt and bugs wouldn't get stuck to the polyurethane, which had a terrible chemical smell like spray paint that was also kind of a good smell.

“This is it, kiddos,” Lynn said, standing before the almost-finished footbridge, all three hundred feet of it snaking up toward the observatory. “We're going to be done by Friday, and I encourage you to invite your family and friends to come celebrate the official opening of the Youth Workforce Footbridge.”

“Sounds like a rager,” I said. “I assume there'll be a keg.”

Lynn started for a minute, then seemed to adjust. “Yes,” he said. “It'll be a two-keg party, starting at nine a.m.”