Lost Stars (10 page)

“Let me drive you home,” he said.

“I can do it.” But when I mounted the bike, it wouldn't move. The chain was gnarled, the wheel bent. “Okay,” I said. “I can't do it.”

Lynn loaded the bike into the back, which was messy with kid toys and gardening equipment, and I told him where I lived. “The steerage-class section of town,” I said, and he replied, “There are much worse parts of town than that.”

His car smelled a little bit like wood chips. On the dashboard he had a psychology textbook with a bookmark sticking out of it. We bumped along in silence. A photograph of a baby dangled from his rearview mirror.

“Yours?” I asked.

He nodded. “Mine. Though now I have two. I've been too busy with school and work and changing diapers to put a picture of Oscar up there.”

“I love that name,” I said. I had babysat a kid named Oscar before I was robbed of my career, and I thought about the kid at two, screaming in delight as I pushed him on the swing. I used to love kids. Heck, I used to love Rosie. “Oscar the Grouch was my favorite character on
Sesame Street,
” I told Lynn.

“Why does that not surprise me?”

I don't know why that hurt me. My face sort of puck-ered, and when Lynn glanced at me, he seemed to regret it. What, was I supposed to like Big Bird the best? Who liked Big Bird?

Lynn pulled in front of my house, indifferent, it seemed, to its peeling paint or the sloping front porch. I turned to him and looked for a sec: the strong profile, the big hands, the stoicism—​all that my dad was not.

“I'm not an asshole,” I said.

He got out of the car and took my bike out. Then he took a deep breath and looked at me, and I hated that look. What was that look? Pity, maybe. Therapist look? I hated therapists. Maybe it was the look of drippy, fake understanding. He nodded and leaned my bike against the porch and raised his hand up and squeezed my shoulder lightly and said, “I know that. It's you who has to learn it.”

I took my boots off by the front of the house and stashed the hardhat by the front door before I carried my bike into the yard. I ran upstairs and showered and changed into my cut-up T-shirt and cutoffs, and then I went into the yard barefoot with my guitar and tried to sing that Velvet Underground song—​
I'll be the light on your door to show that you're home
—​but that last layer of post-wild-parsnip peeling had taken my hard-earned calluses away and it hurt. I sat there holding on to my guitar, waiting, waiting, until I heard the clicking sound of Dean's Jeep arriving at Mrs. Richmond's. Then I forced myself to pluck a few notes despite the pain.

After a few minutes, Dean peered over the fence and said, “Hey,” with a nod of his head. Major nonchalance.

“Hey,” I said, hoping he couldn't hear my heartbeat from way over there. I twisted my lips up and started nodding for no reason and looked out of the corner of my eyes, and there had to be something to say—​something. What could I say?

“Hey, um, Dean?”

“Yeah?”

I screwed up the courage to look at him. “Can you fix my bike?”

I sat on the steps and played guitar, ignoring the pain, while he worked his magic with a wrench and a chain checker and a tire lever and a bottle of WD-40. I was pretty terrible with a hammer but, man, did this guy know how to use an Allen key—​whatever that was. It was a sight to behold.

He'd brought over two cups of coffee from his house. “You want?” he asked.

The truth was that I had never had coffee. I'd had eleven different kinds of alcohol and I'd fooled around with seventeen guys, but I'd never had a cup of coffee.

“Sure,” I said.

“It's black—​that okay?”

“Perfect,” I said. After my first sip, I could only describe it as bitter mud.

“I love coffee,” he said. “Especially when it's hot out.”

“Yeah,” I said, and maybe I did love it because he loved it, even though it was gross. Then what? Every couple of sentences we just seemed to stop, and I wanted it to keep going forever, and I also couldn't take another minute of it. I plucked notes on the guitar as best I could with my decrepit hands.

“So, I have a question,” I said.

“You're in luck—​I have an answer.”

“So, like, what are you doing here?” I played a lick of a Violent Femmes song.

“You mean, besides fixing bikes?”

“Yeah. I mean, you live with Mrs. Richmond now?”

“Just for the summer,” he said, spinning the wheel to see where it caught on the brakes. My heart descended into the bottom of my shoes. “My dad sent me to live with his sister while I get my shit together.”

“Where do you live the rest of the time?” I didn't ask about what getting his shit together meant, or why he had to come here to do it.

“Oregon,” he said. “Eugene. At least, if I go back to college in the fall, that's where I'll live.”

If.
If
was the best word in the entire English language.

“I've only finished one semester,” he said. “I'm not sure if they'll let me back in.”

He started dismantling the whole rear section of my bike, and he must have seen the panic on my face. “Don't worry—​I'm just working on the back rack,” he said. As if that was why I was panicking. “So you can get that hardhat on there.”

Once again, “Oh” was all I could muster. Die. I needed to die. What could I say? Yeah, I was sixteen, and I had a construction job because I was a screwup, and at some point, he was going to find that out. But what had
he
done?

“Just so you know, I did not want to spend my summer doing construction.”

“What did you want to do?”

“Oh, well.” He had me there. “Actually, I wanted to go to astronomy camp.” Dean laughed. “I know,” I said. “That's so nerdy.”

“Oh, hell, no,” he said. “That's super cool.”

He said this casually, tossing off the words, perhaps not realizing that he had almost made me faint.

“So why didn't you go to astronomy camp?” He oiled the chain and pressed the pedals until the wheels started to move with ease. It was hard for me to continue the chitchat. I wanted to rewind, like a VHS tape, go back to that part where the cutest boy in the world, after hearing me say I wanted to go to astronomy camp, said that what I liked was cool. No—​super cool.

“Oh, well. It was sort of—​my dad wanted me to work instead.” I couldn't get into it. There was so much to explain, and so much shame. Without my even realizing it, I'd started playing the guitar really loud, really hard.

“‘Gone Daddy Gone,'” Dean said.

“Um, what?”

“‘Gone Daddy Gone.' The song you're playing.”

“Oh, right, yes. It's the only punk song with a two-minute-long marimba solo.”

“Yes!” he said, so emphatically that I felt like I was going to fall off the steps. “Can you show it to me?”

“Wait—​me, show you? Aren't you a musician?”

“Just a humble drummer,” he said. “I figured since I was exiled here this summer, I'd learn more guitar.” Exiled. A drummer. Long-haired. Handy. “Tiger says you're really good.”

“
Tiger
said that?” I knew every note, but suddenly I had forgotten them all. I sat there for a minute, shocked, but in a good way, while he stood waiting for my answer. “Um, yeah. I can show you.”

He sat down next to me, wiping his hands on his shorts and then taking up my guitar with the care and respect it deserved, which made me ache a little.

“Well, so, um, yeah, it has a funny chord progression.” I arranged his fingers on the frets. “It's D suspended second, that's the hard-ish one,” I said. One strand of his hair hung in front of his eyes, and I had to force myself not to clear it from his face. “Like this.” I adjusted his fingers, nails slightly bitten with a curve of grease beneath them, and he strummed and the notes came tumbling out perfectly. He smelled of sweat and grease and cheap shampoo, and it was all so good. “Then this,” I said, showing him the switch to B-flat second, and then the rest of the progression and the tricky fingering in the solo, which he totally couldn't get, so he handed the guitar back to me and watched, and the more he watched me, the more I stared hard at my guitar, unable to break my gaze from it. I got to the end of the song, and I still sat there, eyes frozen in the direction of that delicate curve of wood. The silence was like a presence, delicious and terrifying. I thought maybe he was moving toward me. Maybe that was his head getting closer to mine.

Then my dad's car pulled in, and he and Rosie got out and walked into the yard.

“Hello,” my dad said, looking at Dean.

“This is Dean. He's fixing my bike,” I said.

“Okay,” Dad said.

“He lives over there,” I said. “With Mrs. Richmond.”

“I know he does.” He did? “How are you?”

“I'm fine,” Dean said. He was not apparently one of those parent charmers like Tommy, Mr. Suave, who said to my dad,
I'll be sure to keep your daughter safe,
and then two hours later, after plying me with drugs, laid me down on the football field for a night of debauchery. “How are you?”

“Good,” my father said. Rosie watched us all, the awkwardness so present we could practically see it.

Dean turned to me. “I'm going to Soo's tomorrow.” He paused. “If you want to come or something.”

Rosie gaped and gawked and then she just started laughing, and I hated her so much. “She's grounded,” she said.

Vomiting was an option for me at that point. So was fainting. Pummeling Rosie—​well, but I couldn't even consider such a thing after what I'd done the year before.

“She can go to Soo's,” my dad said, much to my shock.

“I can?” I asked just as Rosie said, “She can?”

My dad pulled a paper bag of groceries to his chest. “She can go to Soo's tomorrow if she's back by eleven sharp.”

I called Soo that night, telling her
every detail of the afternoon, the way the sun glinted off the hair on his forearms and how strong his forearms were because he fixed bikes. He knew how to fix things. And he knew how to play guitar—​mostly—​and he knew how to play drums and he was going to be a sophomore in college next year except that he didn't know if he was going back to college. His perfect slightly flat, twangy voice. His smell.

“Good,” Soo said. “It sounds good.” But she seemed hesitant.

“What?” I asked.

“I just don't want you to freak out again.”

I hated it when she referred to that, the one time that I almost sort of went out with a boy, a dark-skinned boy in between my grade and Soo's named BJ, who was, amazingly enough, on the golfing team. I had just turned fifteen, and he came up to me one day and asked if I wanted to go out with him, so I said yes, and then a week later, we still hadn't spoken, on the phone or in person or anything. There was a dance that night and I asked if he was going and he said no and for some reason I said, “I hope you get hit by a car.” In fact, as confusion settled into his brows and he turned to walk away from the science lab, where my flour-and-cocoa meteor model stood behind me, I started yelling, “I hope you die a terrible death.” Soo held on to me as I screamed, shushing me and then walking with me from school over to the arcade and offering me a cigarette and distracting me with endless games of Ms. Pac-Man. But I wasn't really thinking about what I'd said to BJ—​I was thinking that day how I wouldn't have anyone to go to the dance with. How I would be alone, forever.

Then BJ came into the arcade and said, “I don't want to go out with you anymore,” which was one of the only things he ever said to me—​we had never even touched for a single second—​and he said it right there in the middle of the arcade, the thrusting sounds of Space Invaders and Centipede his anti-serenade. I just slumped into a ball and cried. I cried so much that Soo had to pick me up off the floor and drag me to a payphone and call her mom to come pick me up. When she did, her mom let me sit in the front seat and gave me a beer and a cigarette and said, “Men—​who needs 'em?” Even though she'd been married to Soo's father for a million years.

And when I couldn't recover, when I went plummeting into sobs, over and over again, saying how I didn't want to be alive anymore, they had to take me to the hospital and they pumped me full of something that made everything fuzzy and dull and they kept me there for a week, keeping me numb numb numb. All I had to do was promise that I wouldn't hurt myself, that I wouldn't take drugs, that I wouldn't talk to that BJ boy, and they let me go. All I had to do was lie. It had nothing to do with BJ. It could have been anyone.

“I'm the only one who doesn't have a boyfriend,” I said now. “When is it going to be my turn?”

“I don't know,” Soo said. “Soon.”

The next morning, I rode my bike to the enviro-boot camp so fast that I was the first one there. I had stayed up late, adding songs to a mix tape that, I didn't know, maybe I'd give to Dean someday—​“September Gurls,” the Pretenders, Billy Bragg, the Kinks' “Strangers”—​and it was so still and silent when I arrived at the site: crickets and the rustling of the timothy grass. A red-winged blackbird landed on a jewelweed bush. I hooked my hammer into the loop on my pants and sat by the creek, following the muddy path with my eyes, the place where we'd be building the footbridge and saving the day. I had to admit it: I had grown fond of this spot, of the
Star Trek
-ish calcium deposit, its strange sulfuric smell, of being so close to the observatory even though I had not yet dared go in it; I'd only been there once since the night Ginny died.

That night was one of the few times when, instead of tagging along, I'd been leading the expedition, excitedly chattering about the lunar eclipse and selling it without too much nerdiness as “the whole sky's gonna turn dark in the middle of the day, and the moon will be blood-red.”