Moon Shadow: The Totally True Love Adventure Series (Volume 1) (9 page)

O
utside the restaurant, I walk casually through the parking lot crammed full of cars. I glance over my shoulder. Sarah, thirty yards or so behind, is running between cars to catch up. Suddenly I notice a flash of lights to my left. A Porsche 911 Turbo has entered the lot and is gaining speed rapidly; the car roars down the lane in back of me, headed straight for ... Sarah! ... My God!

I wheel around and dart to the middle of the lane where I arm-tackle Sarah, lifting her off her feet and driving her back between two parked cars a split-second before the Porsche streaks by us in a red blur.

The 911 Turbo screeches noisily to a stop, too late, accelerates and races out of the lot. I’ve stayed on my feet, with Sarah in my arms. I hold her a moment, then release her slowly. Sarah leans back against a parked car, gasping for air. As we had collided I’d knocked the wind out of her, and she’d let out a pithy cry, a yelp. Now she begins to cry, her face flushed, the teardrops streaming down her cheeks. She covers her face with her hands.

“Are you all right?” I ask, perhaps foolishly.

Sarah stops sobbing, brushes the tears from her face with both hands and stands up straight, smoothing her dress. “I, I, oh gosh,” she says, still out of breath. But then she adds, as she quickly regains her composure, “Yes, of course I’m all right. My Gucci hobo.”

Her small white purse lies unscathed in the lane. I retrieve it, and Sarah takes out a Kleenex, wipes her eyes and blows her nose.

“Let’s not tell my mom about this, okay? She’d kill me for being so stupid. I’m fine now.”

“You sure?”

“Lead the way.”

I walk on, and Sarah follows. As I pass my father’s Lexus at the edge of the lot, I uncoil with anger and enthusiasm a phrase of disgust: “Materialistic asshole.”

As I look back at Sarah, she’s making purposeful, thrusting strides to keep up. When I reach my Mazda I turn my gaze toward the hills west of the Valley. The sky, set afire by the descending sun, is a dazzling reddish-orange.

Sarah approaches and says, “Why did you say that back there? Whom were you talking about?”

“Nobody.”

“I won’t tell, I promise.”

“Forget it. I was talking about the congressman, okay? A full-blown egoist. Now you can run and tell your mommy.”

“You should learn not to make personal remarks. It’s very rude. I think you’re charmingly anarchic, but why are you being so petulant? I didn’t do anything to you.”

“I’m feeling joyfully venomous. I’m a cynical idealist. You wouldn’t understand.”

“Try me, I skipped fourth grade and I have the requisites to take college courses in the eleventh grade. I read extensively, and I speak Spanish, almost fluently. You’re the one who thinks he’s superior.”

“You’ve quite a vocabulary for a little girl.”

“Mock me all you want. I have been reading at the adult level for some time. I just finished Kate Chopin’s
The
Awakening
. I have an encyclopedic memory, and in the fall I will study French, and American Literature.”

“The British writers, Huxley, Orwell, that’s where it’s at, not to mention Blake, Keats and Shakespeare.”

“I’ve read
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
and
Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There
, and more recently,
Romeo and Juliet
,” Sarah says. “It was so romantic, particularly the ending, but I do admit that for Shakespeare’s English I had constantly to refer to explanatory notes. I just don’t know why you’re being so, oh, you know.” She looks at me with good-natured reproach, shaking her head.

I decide to veer towards plain candor. “Look, my mother died just six months ago and now my father, looking dapper in his ostentatious suit, brings your mother, and you, into the picture and he wants to send me away for the summer. He would have us believe that the government, made up of people like him, is going to save us from our plight with the moon. He wants to sell the house I’ve lived in for fifteen years, would have me major in professional greed at college, didn’t bother to attend my high school graduation because his political meeting was more important, and all I want is to get my girl back.” I add, with a hint of bitterness, “You’re the classic only child, snotty and self-absorbed. You were no doubt an eagerly awaited baby, born with a sense of theater, of carefully choreographed exits and entrances. Don’t bug me, Queen Alice.”

Sarah’s pale skin blushes pink as a carnation. I sigh expressively. I hadn’t intended to hurt her feelings. Sarah is as direct and truthful as I am devious and dishonorable. I’ve behaved with gross insensitivity, blowing it as usual.

Sarah looks so sad I fear she’s going to cry again. “I know what you’re thinking,” she says. “Poor little rich girl, what does
she
know about suffering? Well, I’ll tell you something, you’re not the only one who’s lost a parent.”

“What’s
that
mean?”

“My dad, two years ago. His fighter jet crashed in the South Pacific during a storm. He went down in rough seas and was never found. I still want to believe he’s out there somewhere, like on a little island or something.”

“That really blows,” I say, with deeply felt empathy.

Sarah is right. I’ve been acting as if I despise her simply because I was feeling envious of her, before I heard about her father. I wanted to become just like her, or what I had assumed is just like her: living without financial worries, making a lot of friends, having a loving parent, living a totally carefree life.

I open the car door for Sarah and then run around to the driver’s side and get behind the wheel. Turning to face her, I say, softly, “Hey, listen, I’m sorry.”

Her eyes seem to generate their own light as she catches my gaze and holds it. “That’s okay,” she says, in a whispery tone. She pauses, and averts her eyes. “So you’re having a crisis with your girlfriend? What’s her name?”

“Liz, Liz Santini. I haven’t the words to describe how she makes me feel; she’s beautiful.”

Sarah glances at me. A trace of a sad smile skims her lips. “Wow. That’s romantic.” It’s as though I’ve touched a nerve. She pushes up into a dignified posture and raises her chin.

“Do I look like I’m having a crisis?” I ask.

“Everyone our age is having a crisis,” Sarah says. “I know you’re not supposed to get them until mid-life, but I think something’s happened to our metabolisms.”

“Our metabolisms?”

“Yes, the world is moving so fast now and we’re all chasing something so fast that we start freaking out long before our parents did. Here, feel my heart.”

Sarah takes my hand and places it over her heart. “Feel how fast it’s beating?” she says.

Now it’s my turn to blush. “Yes,” I answer. “It’s fast all right.”

She releases my hand and says, “Because we don’t ever stop to breathe anymore. You have to remember to breathe or you’ll die.”

“That’s interesting,” I say, for lack of something better, as I start the engine and begin to drive west on Broadway, towards Fletcher College.

Sarah goes on, cheerfully, “Where’d you get the car? It’s cool. I like the gold color, and the rag top.”

“My grandma bought it, last summer.”

Sarah’s slender legs are crossed just inches from my hand on the gearshift. She smells of scented soap. For a kid, I conclude, she’s quite attractive. She possesses a shapely body, indecisive between adolescence and maturity. Her form and posture bring to mind images of a ballet dancer, but her coloring belongs to a movie star. She is pale without a touch of pink in her creamy white skin. In the restaurant, each time she’d taken a drink of Pepsi, I glimpsed the liquid going down her throat. Or so I had imagined. She will be a goddess, soon, with her saintly Roman nose, full lips and lovely swerving cheekbones.

But she’s only a kid, I tell myself. Perhaps she hasn’t even reached puberty yet. I recall the words of Rousseau, who’d termed puberty “the second birth.” “Henceforth no human passion is a stranger—”

Interrupting my reverie, Sarah says, “So you don’t believe your father’s plan to nuke the moon is going to help us?”

I glance at her as I’m driving. “Well, even if we could create a force large enough to change the moon’s orbit without blowing it to bits, one slight miscalculation with a nuclear device will spell immediate doom.”

“How so?”

“What if we accidentally blow up a part of the moon? A shower of rocks will come raining down on us like a million radioactive asteroids. The dust and ash from such an explosion could block the sun and cause a nuclear winter here. The fallout would enter the stratosphere first and then the troposphere. I’m not trying to scare you or anything, it’s just that I’m against using a nuclear device.”

“What would you recommend?” Sarah asks. “I mean, we have to do
something
.”

“I’d put primary emphasis on figuring out why the orbital shift happened in the first place. That might lead to a solution. But if we end up trying to blast our way out of this, let it be done with conventional bombs. There would still be problems, like tsunamis if large chunks of debris fall into the oceans.”

After several long moments of silence, during which Sarah seems to ponder my remarks anxiously, she says, “Thank you for saving me back there. You’re very quick on your feet.” She gets to her knees on the seat and leans towards me. “Hold still.” She brings her face gently over to mine, her lips within an inch of my lips, as though she were going to kiss me, but instead she flutters her eyelashes softly on my cheek, affecting a tickle.

I flinch, and then hold steady as she continues to move her eyelashes against my cheek for a long moment. The closeness between us is disturbing, almost frightening. “What are you doing?” I smile, and my heart races, although I’m not sure exactly why.

“It’s a butterfly kiss. Don’t worry; it’s not a real kiss. My dad showed me when I was a child and I used to kiss him goodnight that way, so it’s okay. It’s a way of expressing my gratitude.” She laughs, a girlish giggle.

My face flushes again, from an emotion I can’t quite identify. I feel Sarah’s eyes on me. I want—again, without knowing why—to impress her in every possible way. I love her smile, which is sweetness itself. A few strands of her chestnut hair, tied back severely, have come loose, and that seems to add just the slightest touch of wantonness to her virginal beauty. For fifteen, Sarah is remarkable, doe-eyed and gypsy-like, with no plastic synthetic gloss about her.

I recall how I had stolen a few peeks at her in the restaurant. She would catch me looking, smile, and turn away. I had caught her looking at me just as often, and she would blush when our eyes met. Somehow, it seems, I see a little bit of myself in Sarah.

As we ride in comfortable silence, my thoughts turn to Julie, who looked sexy tonight in her low-cut red dress. I’m perplexed by how she had stealthily (underneath the table) taken off a shoe and placed her foot in my crotch, and with her bare toes clawed at the denim material on the inside of my thighs. Usually, Julie behaves with indifference towards me, although I know she’s aware of her power over me. She’s never done anything remotely like what she did tonight. All this while my father was giving his lecture to me. Finally, I got up, shot Julie a look of puzzlement and went to the restroom.

Sarah asks suddenly, “Why did you and Liz break up?”

After gathering my thoughts for a moment, I say, “That is a long, unhappy story.” I glance at her with a smile as I drive. “And I prefer to spare you the misery of hearing it.”

“Fair enough. But can I ask if you’re planning to go back with her after the dance recital?”

“Yes, I am.”

“I don’t want to be a hindrance. Tell me how I can help.”

“Thanks,” I say. “I think I can handle it.” Sometimes, I suppose, I exult in my refusal to be helped. “I’m going to ask her out. I’ll take you home; Liz and I will go to The Palace, a dance club near the Sports Arena. There’s live music until two a.m.”

“I’m really sorry about your having to drag me along.”

I slow the car and give Sarah my serious look. “I don’t normally hang out with girls your age, but you seem pretty cool.”

Sarah’s eyes appear to become kind of dreamy, and then after a brief interval, she says, “At the restaurant, why did you argue with your brother?”

“You definitely ask a lot of questions.”

“I’m asking because I find you interesting.”

I really don’t mind her questions. I want to avoid hurting her feelings again. Her precocious nature has gained my respect.

But I certainly don’t want to tell her the truth, which is that I’d lost control when the congressman announced he was selling The Gables. Effectively, by selling the house, my father will destroy a significant piece of my mother’s blessed memory. So I had walked into the restroom, and with my trusty pocketknife I’d scratched out, on the stucco wall, a devilish stick figure with a huge erect phallus, and alongside it the words “Frank killed Mary.” In those moments I had wanted to let the world know the truth about my father. I considered it a gentle form of revenge, a meal that is best served cold. Being praised by a vile man like my father, I’d thought, was as bad as being praised for vile deeds. Now, I feel like a meshuggener, a crazy person, for doing such a thing.