Lost Stars (26 page)

“Do you have a condom?” I asked.

Dean swallowed. “Um . . . yes?”

“Take your shirt off,” I whispered.

He slipped his Iggy Pop T-shirt off, and he had freckles on his chest, too, and really strong forearms and these beautiful shoulders, and I put my hands on his shoulders, and oh my god. “Oh my god,” I said, and he kissed me again and then he kissed my neck, and I wished I would stop saying “oh my god,” but oh my god.

“Wait,” he said.

“Why?”

“Just one second.” He went out to the car and turned the radio on. I recognized “Crimson and Clover.”
I don't hardly know her, but I think I can love her.
I sat cross-legged, waiting.

“I don't know this version,” I said when he came back.

“Tommy James and the Shondells,” he said as he kissed my neck.

“I only know the Joan Jett one,” I said as I kissed him back.

“That's good too.”

“I think she's underrated.” Then more kissing.

“Nah,” he said, his mouth on my neck again. “‘I Love Rock-n-Roll' is pretty average, considering—”

“Oh my god, shut up!” I said.

Then for a minute, we both sat there, Dean with his shirt off and me with my heart beating and all of my clothes and one shoe, and then he grabbed me and kissed me again and said, “Now is the time when your shirt is going to come off,” and he took my flannel shirt off and pulled my tank top over my head and laid me down on the floor, and I said, “Ow, crap,” because the floor was stupidly hard and cold because it was a stone floor, and he said, “Hold on,” again and went out to his car and got that blanket he'd given to Rosie the night we went to my mom's house and put it on the floor, and there was more kissing. On my neck. My eyebrows. My chest. Everywhere. Ow and wow and oh my god oh my god oh my god.

It was almost dawn, his favorite time of day and the sky a perfect cornflower blue, when I opened my eyes.

“Dean,” I said, shaking him awake. “We fell asleep.” He sat up and rubbed his eyes and smiled and kissed me and then he kept kissing me, and I was saying, “We have to go. I have work. My dad is going to kill me,” but he was still kissing me and I lay back down.

The sun was pretty high in the sky by the time we rose and put our clothes on. I looked away when he stood up to get dressed, and I turned myself toward the wall when I put my bra back on, but then he came over and did the clasp for me and then we had to get to kissing all over again.

“Dean—​what time is it?” I asked when I could free myself.

“I don't know,” he said.

I looked out the window of the observatory. Down the hill the gang was gathering. Not just the workers but some of their parents—​or guardians—​and Pablo and, uh-oh, my dad.

“Holy crap,” I said. “I think I'm in big trouble.” I hurriedly put my shoes on and ran to the door.

“Wait,” he said. “I'm coming with you.”

And that is how Dean and I came to be walking down the observatory steps together, and onto the footbridge in full view of the entire crowd, and I couldn't help but pretend that this was our wedding because I had in fact already planned out our entire existence together, but first I would have to figure out how to keep my father from grounding me for the rest of my life.

Lynn was standing in front of the crowd, and Dean stood next to me, and we weren't holding hands, and I didn't know when you were supposed to hold hands and when you weren't because I'd never had a boyfriend before. Until now. If I'd taken a cue from Justin and Soo, I'd actually have been humping Dean's leg like a dog right about now.

“Friends,” Lynn said, “we are gathered here today”—​maybe it
was
a wedding!—​“to witness the unveiling of the hard work done by these young people this summer.” He then looked earnestly at each one of us, the maybe-not-so-wayward youth.

“They started as novices,” he was saying, “and with humility and perseverance, they came to know these tools well.” Oh god—​he was holding up the hammer and the nail again, and going into the thing about how great the rumbling of hunger in the belly was after a hard day's work. I couldn't help it—​I let out a loud yawn.

That made my father turn around. He made an attempt to smile at me—​we were still learning how to use those muscles again—​and then he stepped back to stand next to me and Dean. He shook Dean's hand, and Dean said, “Hello, sir.”

I really had to stop feeling like I was going to faint at everything Dean said and did pretty soon. Suddenly I wanted to be conscious for everything.

After the festivities—​Lynn had tied a sorry-looking ribbon between two erect shovels, which Jimmie cut with pruning shears—​there was, as promised, a big tank of Dunkin' Donuts coffee (which Dean happily gulped down) and donuts. My father chatted with Pablo by the food. I was hungry of course, and not finding that rumble of hunger to be particularly satisfying, despite Lynn's constant prattling on about it. But I didn't want to have to talk to Pablo.

“So,” Lynn said, “who wants to be the first to walk across the bridge, to the other side of Notch Creek?”

For some reason, my hand shot up. “Me,” I said, unable to remove the smile from my face. My feet started walking. The bridge was solid beneath my feet, sturdy. I could imagine it being here for generations. I paused in the middle of the creek and forced myself to look north, toward the observatory, lonely on the hill. Then I turned around and motioned for Dean to come after me.

“Carrie,” he said as he stepped off the bridge, “I have to go to work.”

“Oh, crap. Okay.”

“I'll see you later? After work? I'll come get you?”

“Yes,” I said, almost too happy, almost crying with happiness. Did we kiss now? In public? What were the rules? How did anyone have a boyfriend? How could I be separated from this guy for more than seventeen seconds? Of course, the summer was almost over. Our timing was terrible. He might be leaving when everyone went off to start school. He might never come back. We might have only a few nights together, me and the world's best human being/boyfriend. Now I was crying, only a tiny bit but enough that I tucked my head into Dean's shirt for a second to hide.

“Hey—​hey,” he said, pulling me away from his shirt. Oh. Right. We weren't there yet. No public affection. Right.

I looked at my shoes. Then he leaned down so his face was the same height as mine and kissed me. It was fast, but it was deep, and it was everything.

My father didn't force me to talk to Pablo, and for that I was grateful. I sat along the creek, eating donuts with Tonya and Jimmie until my dad walked up. I stood to meet him.

“You want a ride?” he asked. “Your bike is still at home.”

I swallowed. Oh, lord. Here it came. My recent weeks of freedom coming to an end. I would be grounded or, worse, forbidden to see Dean. I couldn't win.

“I could probably take the bus,” I said. “Or get a ride with someone.”

“Why would you do that?” He looked genuinely confused.

“Um . . . to avoid getting yelled at?”

He offered some sliver of a smile, something vaguely warm but not completely full of forgiveness. “You staying out last night is not my favorite thing you've ever done. But it's definitely not my least favorite thing.”

I twisted up my lips for a sec. “I have to admit that this calm reaction is particularly surprising to me, and I'm not totally sure how to respond. Am I grounded? Can I still see Dean?”

“I like him,” he said. “I think he's good for you. Mrs. Richmond thinks you're good for him.”

“What? Really?” I shook my head. “When did you discuss this?”

“Since before he came,” he said.

“Wait—​is this, like, an arranged thing? You made us meet?”

“No,” my father said. “You found each other on your own.”

That night, Dean did the thing where he drove around the block to park in front of my house and he got out of the car and came up the steps to where I was waiting and he leaned in and kissed me so hard that I almost fell over, not from the force of his body but just from the sheer unbelievable goodness of it. It was so good.

“Hey,” I said when I recovered. “Can you take me somewhere?”

“Um . . . yes . . . ? Not your mom's, right?”

“No.” I smiled. “Much less depressing than that.”

We got in the car, me with my work boots on my lap. The days were growing shorter, and by now, at eight o'clock, the sky was softly sketched with darker blue, light that could have been dusk or dawn, Dean's favorite time or mine. I told Dean to drive, fast, down the Avenue of the Pines, and as he did, I opened the window and threw my well-worn shitkickers out the window, not far from the white cross. Yes, true, an act of vandalism, or at least littering, but maybe some young and budding construction worker would find them and discover their inner youth workforce person and live happily ever after among the tent stakes and shovels.

“Aw, man,” Dean said, “I loved you in those boots.” And then he said, “Oh, no, I just, those boots, I just meant”—​I had frozen, my hand on the door—​“you looked hot in those boots.”

“Well,” I said, “sometimes you have to let the things you love—​even work boots—​go.” But neither of us laughed, because neither of us had actually brought up the quickly approaching reality that would involve letting things go.

As we drove farther into the park, we passed Tonya and Jimmie walking. They were holding hands. It made my chest full in some sweet and confusing way.

“Hey,” I called out, “see you in physics.”

“Yep,” she called back. “I may or may not talk to you.”

I flipped her off and then waved, and I remembered that first half of the year in seventh grade, when I still wrote notes to my friends in my own grade, bubbly handwriting and
i
's dotted with hearts, and crushes on boys—​crushes, not the thing where you got wasted and lay down and let them do things to you. All that purity, so quickly corrupted. And then I thought that I hadn't lost my innocence by having sex with Dean; I'd gained it.

We parked by the giant calcium deposit, and I reached into my pocket and took out a white paper envelope.

“What's that?” Dean asked. I held it up to his nose. “Hmm. I can't tell.”

“It's caraway,” I said. “You don't have an advanced degree in Persian spices?”

“I do now,” he said.

We went to the side of the creek bed near where we'd had coffee and donuts, and I dug a little hole and pushed the caraway seeds inside.

“That thing is so crazy-looking,” Dean said, joining me, nodding toward the calcium deposit. “Is that what things look like on Mars?”

“I don't think so. From what I've read, Mars is red because of all this rusting iron on the surface.”

“What's the coolest planet?” He crouched down to spread dirt over the seeds.

“Pluto. Block of ice.”

“Not coolest that way.”

“Oh, well, hmm.” I moved a little farther toward the observatory, scattering the rest of the seeds in the grass. “Jupiter has had constant hurricanes for three hundred years. Planet of psychotic breaks if ever I've heard of one.”

He stopped. “I don't think I want to be from that planet,” he said quietly.

“I think you're a quasar.”

“What's that?”

“A bright object in a very remote corner of the universe.”

“Like Oregon?”

I swallowed. “Like Oregon.”

He walked over and pulled me up and kissed me and looked me in the eye, and I looked at him, and I knew everything that he was about to say, but I didn't want to hear it.

“I'm going back,” he said.

“No no no no no.” I shook my head, too hard. It was going to happen. A fit. I could feel my hands starting to shake already. He took hold of them and raised them up to press them against his chest.

“Carrie,” he said. “Carrie.”

And somehow it slowed, but I couldn't keep it in. “You're leaving and I'm never going to see you again and everybody leaves me, all my friends and my mom and the fucking Vira comet, everybody all shiny and beautiful and then gone.”

He kissed my face all over—​forehead and eyes and cheeks and earlobes—​and then he got to my mouth and just kept his mouth on my mouth until I breathed normally again.

“It's only a six-hour flight,” he said.

“It would take me the entire semester to earn enough money for the flight,” I said quietly.

“Or a seventy-three-hour train ride. Or, doing the astronomical calculation, three minutes in warp speed.”

“That's from
Star Trek,
not Einstein,” I said, but somehow a smile had broken through.

“Details, details,” he said. He held up the
Black Holes
book—​he'd been hiding it in his bag. “I've been studying,” he said. It made me almost sick with happiness. “How about a bike?”

“What?” I was still thinking about Dean boning up on black holes and eclipses, all for me.

“It would only take, like, two weeks to ride your bike, assuming you can keep a steady ten miles an hour going over the Rockies and all. But you? You can do it.” He pulled me to his chest.

I sure as hell didn't feel like that, but I knew it was the best thing anyone was ever going to say to me. Other than “I love you.”

“Okay, I don't have a question.”

“You're in luck.” I said, smiling and wiping my face on his shirt. Classy, I knew. “I don't have any answers.”

“I have a statement. I think you need to be open to the idea that people will surprise you. At any time, someone you're sure will disappoint you may come through. Find a little optimism somewhere.”