Lost Stars (22 page)

And we didn't see her again, of course, except in the morgue. And I thought I couldn't submit you to the same fate, the same pain. I had to leave you to save you. I had to leave you to save myself. But I want to be with you. I want to come back. I want you to let me back. I don't know how to work my way back into your heart other than to tell you all this and beg you to forgive me. I beg you to forgive me. And if you don't, I will always love you. Always. Always. Always.

Love,

Mom

I lay on my bed for a long time, staring up at the ceiling, watching the glow-in-the-dark constellations brighten as the sun went down. I felt weirdly empty; all those words swept through me until there was nothing left. They were proof of something, but I didn't even know what. If I didn't talk to someone, I was going to float away like an untethered astronaut.

I picked up the phone and dialed. “Hi, sweetie,” Soo's mom said. “We've missed you. Where have you been?”

“Oh, you know—​living it up,” I said. “Just like you told me to.”

“Well, I'm glad to hear that.” Her voice was syrupy with drink, even though it was only five thirty on a Thursday night. “Hold on, honey. I'll get Soo.”

Then there was the sound of the basement door opening. Music and laughter—​a party, which I hadn't heard in the background before then because of our successful soundproofing project. A party, and I wasn't there.

“Soo,” she called. “Honey, it's Carrie on the phone.”

Then a long, long wait, during which I heard Tommy's unmistakable whine and his terrible selection of the Eagles' “Lyin' Eyes,” and for one second, I was glad I wasn't there.

Finally, Soo got on the phone. “Hey, what's up?” she said, her voice cool.

“I don't know,” I said. “What's up?”

She sighed. “What is it, Carrie?”

“Are you mad at me?”

“To be honest, yes.”

There was no one there to help calm the surprise, maybe the outrage. That person was always Soo. “What did I do?”

“Is that a real question?” she asked. In the background someone hooted.

“It's one hundred percent a real question. What did I do? Can you please just—​can you please just tell me what I did?”

“Okay, fine,” she said. “You left.”

“What? When? When you kicked me out of your house?”

“I didn't kick you out—​you're so overdramatic.”

“What was I supposed to do? Sleep in your hallway? I was in the middle of a total crisis.”

Behind her someone said, “Get off the phone and come drink this beer!” It didn't sound like Justin.

“You're always in the middle of a crisis!” she yelled. It stung, but I knew she was sort of right. “Sometimes other people have crises too.”

“Did you have a crisis?”

“Carrie—​yes. Couldn't you tell when you were here?”

I wrapped the phone cord around my fingers, feeling smaller all the time. Soo must have moved up from the basement, because I couldn't hear the drunken hollering and the thump of music anymore.

“No,” I said. “I couldn't.”

“Justin and I broke up,” she said.

It felt like oops.

“What? Soo—​oh my god. I'm so sorry. What happened? When? Why?”

“Because he doesn't want to live off campus with me when we go to school, and then we had a fight about it, and he maybe doesn't want to have a girlfriend when he goes to college because he wants to ‘see what's out there,' and that's what we were in the middle of when you were here,” she said, as if that should have been obvious to me.

“But you were naked!” I said. “Do people usually break up naked?”

“We were having breakup sex!” she yelled.

“Well, how was I supposed to know that?” I heard nothing on the other end of the line. “Soo, I'm really sorry. That sucks. You guys were really good together,” I said, realizing as I said it that I meant it.

“Yeah, I mean, it's dumb, but I thought we'd be together forever. I thought he was the one. I mean, he was the first person I had sex with, you know?”

“No,” I said. “I don't really know. I don't know anything about that. There's that whole I'm-going-to-die-a-virgin thing.”

Soo laughed, but I thought about how I'd saved that one thing—​I'd loaned out my body for everything else, every drug and every disgusting interlude, but I'd kept one part of me whole, innocent, as if I still believed that there was something good in me to share. And the person I'd saved it for, well, he probably didn't want it anyway.

Then Soo said, “I heard you went to see your mom.”

“Yeah.”

“How was that?”

I laughed. “Um, horrible? I think that pretty much covers it. Wait—​where did you hear that?”

“From Dean,” she said.

“Oh. Is he there?”

“Now? No. He hasn't been around for a couple of days. He was here the night after you went up there, but he seemed a little off. Like, sad or something. And extremely annoyed by Tommy, who was being a drunken jerk, as usual. Dean hasn't been around since. What's happening with you two?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Nothing,” I said. “I guess nothing.”

“Carrie? You want to come over? You want to sleep over?”

“Yes,” I said. “But not tonight.”

Never before had I actually walked around the block and up the stairs to Mrs. Richmond's home on my own. I'd never even been in the front door, since Dean had let me in the side. But I could see Dean's car in the driveway, and so I just did it. I pressed the doorbell. It rang to the tune of “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

Mrs. Richmond answered. I wondered what it was like for her to live in that big place all alone, after her husband had died.

“Um, hi,” I said. “Is Dean home?”

“He's sleeping,” she said, in a soothing therapist voice that I hated.

“Oh.” It was seven thirty at night. “Really?” If I'd known which window was his, I could have come back later with a few pebbles to toss at it, to try to rouse him, but I didn't. I thought about making a break for it, knocking past her to run inside and find him, but Mrs. Richmond seemed to be permanently parked there, standing sentry.

“He's had kind of a rough couple of days.”

At first I thought,
Oh my god, did he have a bike accident? A car accident? Is he okay?
It seemed like she wouldn't tell me if I asked.

“Okay,” I said. I turned to go home, but some broken part of me was emboldened enough to stop. I'd already lost everything. I might as well find out why. I'd find out if the problem was realizing the girl he was into was too crazy to be with. “What happened?” I asked. “To Dean? Why did he have a rough couple of days?”

“Well,” she said, hesitating, “I'd rather that he tell you himself.”

“He'd have to talk to me to do that,” I said, and this seemed to summon some sympathy in her.

“I'm sure he will,” she said, her efficient smile making me furious. I turned to go home. “Carrie,” Mrs. Richmond said, “I know he does want to see you.”

I just waved my hand goodbye, in as polite a way as I could. I tried to hold on to what Greta had said—​I was smart and adorable and loved. I didn't feel like any of those things, but I was going to try.

I'd finished seven weeks of troubled-child boot camp, which I was calling it even though apparently it was just a summer job for budding arborists. As a gift, my father was allowing me to go to Soo's for an official party, as opposed to the secret ones we usually had.

“Don't steal anything, take any drugs, or run away.”

“Um, okay,” I said. “Thanks?”

“Yes, thank you is an appropriate response,” he said. “Don't screw it up, Carrie, okay?”

I looked down at my feet, my toes still a little bruised from their day of being forced into Soo's too-small hiking boots. We had a few more weeks of summer and then everyone I loved—​well, everyone but Rosie—​would be heading to the black hole of college. At least he was letting me orbit around them one last time.

“Okay?” he asked sternly.

“Yeah,” I said. “Okay.”

It felt so good and so sad to be at Soo's again, to be in the safe harbor of that basement and all the pleather furniture and the mirror ball and Plastic Ono Band screeching from the stereo, the pumping of the bass in the mostly soundproof-ish walls. There were ways that I'd turned into a different person in these past weeks, as if the calluses that had sloughed off after the wild parsnip incident had let someone new out, someone 6 percent less tortured. And there were other ways that I was still maddeningly the same. For one thing, I still did not seem to have a boyfriend.

Tommy was standing in front of me when the door opened and in walked Dean. He looked a little haggard, but then again, his hair was always mussed and his shorts were always painted with a streak of bike grease. He didn't look over at me, but I kept looking, no matter how much it hurt.

“So you and the bike mechanic, huh?” Tommy said, standing next to me and tugging hard on a bottle of Bud. “Guess that makes sense, since you're a construction worker now.”

I shrugged. Me and the bike mechanic? Hardly.

He had a menacing look on his face and he was staring at me harder than he'd ever stared at me before.

“What, Tommy?”

“Just wait there, Hardhat,” he said. “Wait right there.” And he disappeared into the bathroom.

I watched Dean from across the room, talking to Soo and Tiger, running his hands through his greasy hair, a different kind of nervous from when I'd first met him. Occasionally he shifted his head as if sensing me on the other side of the room, but he didn't turn. I should never have had him take me to my mom's.

Now Tommy came stumbling out of the bathroom. He pressed a finger against my chest but he was the one who stumbled backwards. Then he smiled and said, “I just brushed my teeth.”

“Thank you for that astounding revelation, Thomas.”

“Don't you like a guy who brushes his teeth until they bleed? That's what he told you—​I heard it. I can't think what else you like about that guy. It can't be what he says about you. Carrie”—​and here he stumbled toward me—​“I'm the one who really likes you.”

I backed up. “What did he say?”

“What do you mean?” Tommy was wobbling slightly.

“What did he say?”

“To me? Nothing.”

“Who'd he say something to? About me?”

“Oh, about you. He said you were crazy.”

My heart was making a break for it. Or maybe it was the contents of my stomach. I looked over at Dean and now he looked back at me, and he seemed kind of miserable and tortured and not at all like the person who had told me the happy secret of his tooth brushing a few weeks ago, a happy secret that Tommy apparently hoped to emulate.

“Who'd he say that to?”

“To Soo.”

I digested this information. Or I tried to, but I couldn't. It was information knocking at my door that I couldn't let in. “When?”

“No, wait. I can't remember. Maybe she said it to him. She said you were crazy. Like, made of broken glass or something.”

Very quietly, I said, “Then what did he say back?”

Tommy shrugged. “Just that he agreed.” Tommy cleared his throat and righted himself, as if he'd reached back and pulled up the collar of his shirt to make himself taller. “Like I said”—​and now he wobbled again, leering toward me—​“I'm the only one who really cares about you.”

That face had throbbed before me plenty of times, as had others, but I'd never really looked at any of them. I didn't care who they were, only that they'd cast their vote for me, deemed me fool-around-worthy, worth the trouble of trying. I only cared that they plied me with enough booze and drugs and laid me down so I could be excused from my brain for the length of the transaction, whether a half an hour or five minutes. But now I truly looked at Tommy, at the pressed waves of his shiny black hair and the one fleck of black in his otherwise bright brown irises, or the zipper-shaped scar on his left cheek, all the things besides the mysterious makeup of his DNA that made him a unique individual, the current manifestation of those same molecules that fled from collapsing stars billions of years ago. We're all made of atoms that were here in the very first moments of Earth, churned up and spit out in new incarnations every time something or someone was born or died. And I took comfort in this, looking at Tommy's baby-round cheeks and half-closed eyelids and drunken attempt to form his soft lips into a pucker—​he had beautiful lips, I'd give him that. I took comfort in knowing I only had to go through this life once.

Tommy's face was still close to mine, his lips puckered into an invitation. I could do it. I could move forward two inches, could fall back into the comfortable pillow of the old, gross routine. I knew Dean was looking at me now, and I parted my lips and moved toward Tommy.

The words to a Paul Simon song coursed through the speakers: how losing love is like a window in your heart, how everybody can see that you're blown apart. I pushed Tommy aside and turned to go, ignoring Dean's voice calling, “Carrie—​wait,” as I walked out of Soo's basement, got on my bike, and flew away.

I was late, just by a few minutes, but my father was not sitting in the flowered chair.

“Hello?” I called, softly, in case he was asleep and wouldn't note my tardiness.

“Carrie. You came home.” My father stood at the top of the stairs. “Come here.”

“No.” I couldn't bear another fight.

“Please.”

“I'm only five minutes late. Please, Dad. Please just leave me alone.” The only person I felt like running to besides Soo was Dean. And I'd lost them both.