Lost Stars (2 page)

When I got to Soo's, the partying was in full swing. Soo's dad owned a bar downtown—​a skeevy but apparently very lucrative biker bar in which we were never allowed to set foot—​and was never home at night. Her mom, well, she was usually too intoxicated herself to even come down to the basement to check on us. “One of the world's few female Korean-American drunks,” Soo often noted.

Soo had a finished basement that she'd done up all 1970s: fake wood paneling, red pleather couch, a killer sound system, a mirror ball—​the kind of stuff rich kids had, but which I, through the miracle of Soo's generosity and our family tragedy, had access to. It was like having our own discotheque, even though nobody liked disco anymore. Or, well, almost nobody. Secretly I still loved “I Will Survive,” my favorite song when I was six.

The boys were all there, including Tommy Patarami and Tiger Alvarez and Justin Banks, and they'd set up a couple of amps and mikes and a drum kit in the back of the room. The guys were standing in front of Soo's dad's enormous wall of records, picking out what to play. “The Ghost in You” by the Psychedelic Furs was on. I did my goofy dance, sort of the-twist-meets-mosh—​I was not that into the Psychedelic Furs—​and Tommy yelled, “What's up, Rye Bread?” and I laughed, even though I hated when he called me that. “Not much, Pastrami,” I said, and someone else said, “She got you, Patarami.” There was nothing better than making people laugh. Well, almost nothing better. I was pretty sure a couple of things were better.

“Carrie!” Soo and Greta left the scrum of half-intoxicated boys to greet me, handing me a beer and huddling around me like the world's prettiest football players. I could smell the sticky sweet scent of Soo's mousse, and I was semi-suffocating inside their group hug and pushing them away, but only lightly. Some part of me just wanted to stay in there forever. “Our little Carrie is here!”

“Yay,” I said, my normal deadpan. “Let the rejoicing begin.”

I was sixteen, going into eleventh grade, and they had all just graduated, as Ginny would have too. These used to be her friends, and then, in her absence, they were mine; I had been subsumed by her world. The only thing I missed about my old life was astronomy club. At this point, I no longer had any extracurricular activities other than songwriting and amateur drug taking. And who would do that with me when they were gone at the end of summer, off to their new lives at college? It would be like losing my sister all over again.

“They're not going to play, are they?” I asked Soo, nodding at Justin, who was standing in front of his Flying V guitar, as we sank into the red pleather couch. I'd always thought that was a dumb-looking guitar. “They suck, you know. And they have the worst band name in history.”

“Piece of Toast isn't that bad.”

“It's always a bad idea to name your band while tripping,” I said.

“Well, they might play,” Soo said. “Depends on if my mom passes out or not. She's been complaining about the noise. Apparently alcohol does not dull your hearing.”

The boys didn't bother coming over. Tommy buried his face in a pile of records. I hadn't seen him since he'd shoved his fingers up me in an attempt at something vaguely sexual, which had happened on the football field when we got wasted the weekend before. It seemed he had decided to pretty much ignore me, which was fine, so I traced the rim of my beer can with my fingertip and tried to look bored so I wouldn't look unmoored, as if I were in danger of drifting off the couch and out of orbit, holding on to the upholstery buttons for dear life. It wasn't like I liked Tommy anyway. We were just the only two perpetually single people in the group.

Soo tossed her hair back, her perfect pearl earrings sparkling. “So what's with the fashionable lateness?” She took an expert sip of her beer. Mine was sweating on the table.

“I was waiting outside for the butler to present me,” I said. “Wait—​this isn't my coming-out party? The debutante's ball? Huh.”

Occasionally Soo was immune to my humor. “I wasn't even sure if you were going to show.” She wasn't looking at me, a sign that she was hurt that I was so late, that I hadn't even called.

“I wasn't allowed to leave my room!” I said, and I was already so raw and tired that the flood started coming, my hands in parted prayer position, reaching into the air. Heading toward a fit. “Not all of us have parents who don't have any rules!”

“Okay, Car—​it's okay.” She grabbed my hands from the air and brought them back down, spreading my fingers out on the sticky fabric. She always knew how to calm the wave. “What happened?”

I pressed my hands against the pleather until my heartbeat slowed. I gulped my beer. “Eh, just the usual.” The beer was warm, but I drank it anyway because Greta and Soo and the rest of them were drinking it, and they were my real family, the collective Daddy Warbucks to my orphan Annie.

“You know, a little parental freak-out and some Spider-Man-style escape.”

I wanted to tell Soo about the fight with my dad, but sometimes it seemed like the past couple of years weren't real. That wasn't me screaming and throwing things. That wasn't me in the middle of the sidewalk, face-down, kicking my legs, being dragged off in the ambulance. That was someone who lived inside me. My devilish alter ego. Mr. Hyde. It wasn't me. So I just told her, “I used my Spidey sense.”

“You're such a dork,” she said, and she was smiling, but I wasn't sure she said it to be funny, because when they had rescued me from the funeral and what would have been a lifetime of depressing days after it, my dorkdom—​though softened by my guitar playing and encyclopedic memorization of Public Enemy lyrics—​was still firmly intact.

The truth was, I had never been cool, but Ginny had been the quintessential popular girl. Not the cheerleader kind. The beautiful-girl-with-the-short-dyed-black-hair-and-bright-green-eyes-and-cat's-eye-glasses kind, the introduce-your-kid-sister-to-Elvis-Costello-and-Velvet-Underground kind, the skip-school-but-still-get-good-grades kind, the run-with-the-fast-crowd kind. I had been scrambling to keep up with her even before she was gone.

“I'm just glad you're here.” Soo lifted up her beer. Oh. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I had kept up. “Cheers.”

Before I had even clinked her can, Justin sidled up to us. The perfect eighteen-year-old human being, Justin was a jock and an art room druggie all at once, Johnny Depp-meets-Scott Baio looks with shaggy, chestnut-colored hair and green eyes. He crouched down next to Soo and picked up her hand and stroked it. I pretended to vomit. Justin got that look, like he didn't know if he should laugh.

“Oh, no—​don't take it personally. I've just had too much to drink.” I raised my nearly full first beer. He still didn't laugh. “I'm just messing with you,” I said, and lightly punched his arm.

“Ow,” he said. At least I'd thought it was lightly. “I'm getting another beer.”

Soo went with him, and Greta sat with me. In her fuchsia Cyndi Lauper dress, strapless with a fluffy crepe skirt on the bottom, her Converse high-tops and her long, feathered, perfectly curly strawberry blond hair—​achieved naturally, no perm necessary—​she looked like a movie star: Kim Basinger, but somehow even prettier. Greta. She was good at tennis and still a hippie chick and a cheerleader anyway. She was so good at holding her liquor. So statuesque. How could one person be so many good things? No wonder she always had a boyfriend. Everything about her was pretty. I was wearing one of my mom's old T-shirts with the sleeves cut off and the bottom sliced into fringes, and cutoff Lee jeans.

“Drink up, kid,” she told me with that perfect smile. I'd do anything she said. So I drank, even though I much preferred my mom's iced tea, the kind she made from the mint she grew every summer in pots on our porch. Beer no longer tasted like toe fungus (or what I thought toe fungus would taste like), but I would never actually like it. “So what's up?”

“Let's see,” I said. “I'm currently locked in my room, as you can see.”

“Ah, the father,” she said.

“Yeah, it sucks when they pretend that they actually care about you so they can ground you.”

“That's what they say. Luckily my dad doesn't even pretend.”

“God, you
are
lucky,” I said, smiling at her joke. I wondered if she knew how lucky she was. I'd never met her dad, but I figured he must be wealthy and handsome and worldly and kind if he'd sired her.

Justin and Soo stood in the corner now, holding hands, cocooned in a private world. “Mmm, young love,” Greta said, as if they were so naïve, as if she knew something they didn't. What did she know?

Greta had not gone a day without a boyfriend since she was twelve—​break up one day, find a new one the next. But Soo hadn't dated much. She'd been more like me: on the sidelines, occasionally pulled into the action but never claimed. And now she was In Love.

What did she know? What did they all know?

In the evening after Ginny's funeral, Greta had retrieved me from the reception and taken me with her and Soo and their friends, driving in some older boy's car with the windows rolled down and the soft spring air on my face, stunned and numb and comfortable in the womblike enclosure of Ginny's friends, with Janis Joplin's “Bye, Bye Baby” blaring through the speaker:
You just got lost somewhere out in the world,
she sang,
and you left me here to face it all alone.
I'd never heard Janis Joplin before. Her voice was sort of like sandpaper and sort of like an organ played by the goddess Athena.

Ginny's friends smoked and drank—​things I had not done until that night—​and we ended up at a roller-skating rink called Diamonds, because roller skating had been Ginny's favorite activity, and there was lots of toasting her, drinking from Ginny's own flask—​how did they get that?—​the flask I was sure my parents never knew she had. The first time I drank that cheap bourbon, I felt my gray matter turning black, felt the stars dim, a feeling I both craved and hated.

And then, suddenly, all fogged in my brain, I was laced up and floating in circles around the place with Greta and her then (and now again) boyfriend, Tiger. I was wearing something I'd taken from Ginny's closet, before my mother cleaned out her room: a pink and gray striped shirt with thin bands of silver between the stripes. Disco-ish, but I hadn't yet learned that we'd declared war on disco.

Greta had gone off to the parking lot with Justin and Tommy to drink some bourbon from the flask, and Tiger and I were still roller skating around the rink by ourselves, and then I felt his hand grab mine, his fingers curl around mine, a feeling it seemed I had waited my whole life to feel. We rolled and glided together across that shiny floor, strobe lights blinking, “Eye of the Tiger” blaring through the speakers, which somehow made it feel like fate, even though that was one of the least romantic songs ever. Dark circles of sweat stained the armpits of my shirt, so I tried to keep my arms plastered to my sides, but that was hard to do and hold Tiger's hand at the same time, and then my palm was so sweaty that my hand slipped out of his and he drifted away and I didn't know how to get him back.

Later, in the bathroom, when I showed Greta the sweat stains, she said, “Don't worry, honey,” and took off her white button-down shirt and helped me into it, and then she said, “Hold on a sec,” and took out her Love's Baby Soft and sprayed it on my neck and then put some strawberry-scented gloss on my lips, which I immediately got on my front teeth because I had never worn my retainer and my overbite had come right back after my parents spent all that money on braces, as they had reminded me constantly before something far worse happened. “There,” she said. And she left the bathroom, looking oh-so-chic in her thin white tank top.

I stood there and looked at myself in the mirror for a few minutes, trying to like what I saw. But it just looked like me with a little lip gloss and Greta's shirt. I wasn't particularly fond of my teeth, the way one of them jutted out, or my hands with their stubby fingers. My head was too small and my brown eyes were too close together and my brown hair was frizzy instead of perfectly curly like Greta's and the space between my nose and my upper lip was too big and I was so, so, so, so, so short and everything about me was off. Worst of all, I was alive.

As I came out, there was Tiger, and he pressed me up against those icy concrete walls and kissed me and it was wrong and bad and it was amazing and I didn't understand. Why had he turned his attention toward me? Did he feel sorry for me because my sister had died? Did Greta know? Tiger was so cute: half Puerto Rican, half Irish, dark skin, dark eyes, a gold chain around his neck, a football jersey, totally out of my league. Or maybe totally out of my league until Ginny had let me step into hers. Ginny, with that little space between her two front teeth, always visible because of her huge smile, and that too-loud laugh, and her perpetually perfect wave of blue eye shadow and her fingerless lace Madonna gloves—​she had walked off, or driven off, leaving a path for me. Was I supposed to be happy about the life she'd left me in her wake?

And then the kiss stopped and Tiger walked back out to the rink. And the evening ended. And we all piled in the back of the car, me and Greta and Tiger, and the two of them made out, but he reached back and held my hand for a minute, gave it a squeeze. A consolation prize. Greta got love and sex. I got a hand squeeze. Ginny would never have anything again.

When I got out of the car, Greta handed me the flask.

Now I picked out records to play: Sam Cooke, Hüsker Dü, R.E.M., the Ramones, and, what the heck, Nina Simone's cover of the Bee Gees:
You don't know what it's like,
she sang,
to love somebody like I love you.
That feeling of one tune connecting to the other, making a story out of a series of songs, of being hit right in the chest when the music gets it right—​it was the best.