Starstruck (37 page)

Even though I knew I wouldn’t be able to get close to Rigel at tonight’s game, I was still eager to get there, just to watch him from a distance. I spent the time before dinner making a list of questions I planned to ask Aunt Theresa tomorrow. I considered starting now, but was worried she might get irritated enough to keep me from going to the game, and I didn’t want to risk that.

As it was, I had a suspicion it had been her idea for Uncle Louie to drive me there tonight, though he seemed okay with it. I was sure she hadn’t guessed I’d snuck out Saturday night, but she was still watching me extra closely. If anything, my being happy this week had her more on edge than my misery the week before. I really couldn’t win with her.

Like he had at the first game of the season, Uncle Louie linked up with some friends as soon as we reached the stadium, leaving me free to go sit with Deb and Bri and their new semi-cool crowd. Now that I was myself again—well, my new, improved self, as opposed to the sickly mess I’d been lately—I was able to properly appreciate our newly elevated social status. Several people greeted me when I joined them, and Dawna Higgs, who was a sweetheart even if she was a JV cheerleader, told me I looked great.

“Thanks. I’m feeling lots better this week,” I said, smiling around at everyone. Then I noticed that “everyone” included Jimmy Franklin, who hadn’t been part of the crowd before. At least, I didn’t think he had.

He noticed me noticing and came over to sit next to me. “Hey, M, lookin’ good.”

“Thanks, Jimmy,” I said, but not at all in a flirty way. I definitely didn’t have room in my heart or head for anyone but Rigel now. On that thought, I turned to watch as the players quit warming up and ran to the sidelines for final instructions before kickoff. Rigel was the fastest, of course, looking as good, as strong, as he ever had.

Just as I was relaxing into appreciation mode, Trina sidled up to him through the gathering crowd, looking like she was angling to give him another good luck kiss. I held my breath, watching for Rigel’s reaction.

It wasn’t quite what I’d hoped. Even though he didn’t kiss her back, he didn’t exactly push her away. Instead, he threw his arm around her shoulders for a quick hug-and-release. I could see she was disappointed, but she still looked smug when she returned to the other cheerleaders, her claim reestablished.

As I watched, Rigel looked up into the stands, spotted me and gave a muted smile and nod, general enough that no one watching could be sure who he was looking at. I smiled and nodded back, then turned to laugh at something Jimmy had just said to Bri about the Frankfort Hot Dogs (yeah, that really is their team name). Peeking sideways at the field, I saw Rigel frowning.

Good. Let him see what it feels like.

The game started then, and I was careful not to do anything else to encourage Jimmy, since that wouldn’t be fair to him. Besides, in a moment I was way too caught up in watching Rigel play to think about anything else.

Though the rest of our team was still mediocre, Rigel was definitely back at the top of his form, running the ball and making impossible passes. Jewel won handily, 24-3.

At the final whistle, I was dying to go down to the field to congratulate Rigel, like I’d always done before our fake breakup, but of course I couldn’t. Even if Smith weren’t still in the stadium, word would get around instantly if it looked like Rigel and I were getting back together.

“You sure you don’t want to come to the party?” Bri asked as I stood up to leave. She’d forgiven me for my rudeness at lunch when I’d pleaded a serious bathroom emergency.

“I told you, I can’t.” I added a touch of pitifulness and a longing glance Rigel’s way and she backed off immediately. With an only slightly exaggerated sigh, I went to find Uncle Louie.

The next day I waited until after I’d mowed the lawn—hopefully for the last time this year—and retaken and passed my taekwondo belt test (no problems at all this time!) before tackling Aunt Theresa with my list of questions. I spent the walk back from taekwondo and my shower afterward screwing up my courage, since I knew this wasn’t going to be easy.

Luckily, she was outside pruning her roses when I came down, which always tended to put her in as nice a mood as she ever had. I took it as a good omen.

I went out into the garden with a plastic grocery bag and, without being asked, started carefully gathering up the clippings and bagging them, a task she occasionally delegated to me. I remembered the hard-learned trick of picking them up by the leaves so I wouldn’t get pricked.

“Pretty day, huh?” It was a lame opening, but better than launching right into questions.

“Yes, yes it is,” she agreed. “Thank you for helping, Marsha.”

“I didn’t want to stay inside when it’s so nice out,” I said, then worked beside her in silence for about five minutes, gathering my courage again.
Now or never
, I told myself. “Aunt Theresa, how did I come to be adopted? I mean, I know you don’t know who my real parents were, but was it through an orphanage, or an agency, or what?”

I half expected her to snap at me to leave it alone, like she used to do when I was younger, but she didn’t. Instead, she gave a long-suffering sigh and nodded.

“I suppose it’s only natural that you’re curious. I’ve never quite forgiven my sister-in-law for what she did, taking you in when she and her husband were such irresponsible gadabouts, but I suppose it’s not your fault.”

Hardly daring to breathe for fear I’d somehow irk her back into her usual taciturnity, I waited for her to go on. After a moment, she did.

“Mind you, I know no more about your birth parents than I’ve ever told you—not their names or where they were from. But because of the, ah, circumstances of your adoption, I’ve always suspected something wasn’t quite right there. It’s one reason I didn’t want to talk to you about it until you were older. But then you . . . stopped asking.”

I managed not to say,
Yeah, because you always bit my head off when I did
. “What do you mean, something wasn’t quite right?” I asked instead.

“You weren’t adopted through an agency or an orphanage. From what Linda told me, she and Jim were approached by an individual who had heard they were looking to adopt. Everything was handled privately—under the table, so to speak. I wondered at the time whether your real parents were on the run—criminals, maybe—or if you were stolen and sold. But I never knew the truth and I don’t think Linda or Jim did, either. They were so happy not to have to deal with the usual red tape, they didn’t question much. I doubt they’d have been approved through the proper channels, which they surely knew full well.”

Since I’d heard way too many times about my adoptive parents’ “hippie” lifestyle as wilderness guides and mountain climbers—something that had always sounded wonderfully exciting to me as a child—I let that particular thread drop and picked up another.

“So . . . they never saw my real parents? Did you ever meet the person who arranged my adoption with them?”

She shook her head, starting to look impatient. “They were out west somewhere at the time—Colorado, I believe, though it might have been Wyoming. One of the square states. Louie and I never heard a word about it until it was too late—that is, until it was finalized.”

“And you don’t have any records, any paperwork or anything?” I was starting to clutch at straws, worried she’d shut me down any moment, as she always had in the past.

“Only your birth certificate, showing a sealed adoption. As far as I know, even your birth date was an educated guess.”

It gave me a weird feeling to think that my birthday might not be my real birthday. Then I realized the Stuarts would know. I’d have to ask them—or ask Rigel to ask them. Maybe it was a minor thing, but it was important to me.

“What about my name?” I asked then. “Did . . . did I tell them that? I mean, I was almost two when they adopted me, right?”

My aunt snipped off a stem shorter than she’d intended and made a “tch” noise before answering. “Twenty-two months, or so they estimated. And yes, you did tell them . . . in a way. Apparently, for the first weeks or months after they got you, all you would say was . . . was—” She paused as though this was difficult for her, which seemed out of character.

“What?” I finally prompted, suddenly even more curious.

“You kept saying . . . ‘Stay safe my Marsha Prentiss.’ Another reason I suspected your parents were running from the law—or something worse. Your real mother must have said that to you repeatedly before abandoning you.”

I stared at her, but barely noticed when she surreptitiously wiped an eye.

Stay safe my Marsha Prentiss
. Except that had never been my name. My real name, according to the Stuarts, was Emileia.
Stay safe . . . my Martian Princess?

I had a sudden, vivid vision—or memory?—of a brown-haired woman bending over me and saying those exact words. She looked frightened—so frightened that I was terrified, too.

If that was a real memory and not my imagination, my Martian parents almost certainly hadn’t died in an accident, as the Stuarts—and Shim?—believed. They’d known ahead of time that they were in danger, and they’d known I was in danger too. And they’d managed to hide me away somehow.

Before they were killed.

CHAPTER 22

Collision course

“There, you see? This is why I didn’t want to tell you any of this when you were younger,” Aunt Theresa said, startling me out of what was almost a trance. “It looks like you still weren’t ready to learn how unsavory your parents may have been. Just remember that your future isn’t determined by your past, and that with hard work and clean living, you can still make something decent of yourself.”

I blinked at her, coming back to the present. “What? Oh. Um, right.” I gathered up two more big handfuls of rose clippings, heedless of the thorns now, and stuffed them in the bag before giving it to my aunt. “Thanks, Aunt Theresa. Really. I’d . . . I’d better get started on my homework.”

Leaving her staring after me in concern, or maybe just in confusion, I went back into the house and up to my room to think about what I’d just learned—or what I thought I might have learned.

Plopping down onto my bed, I stared into space, thinking hard. If my parents had been deliberately killed way back when I was a baby, then Martian bad guys on Earth wasn’t a recent thing. Maybe the dictator—Faxon—had sent an assassin because he didn’t want any survivors of the Royal family? But if he was popular back then, why would it matter, with my parents already off-planet? Had there been some other nefarious plot even then? Something they were only now planning to move ahead with?

I wished I had a safe way to contact Rigel to ask if he’d found out any more from his end. Especially since I was starting to think that there was a lot more going on than either of us—and maybe even Shim and his colleagues—were aware of. And that it was really, really bad.

By dinner time I was getting jittery, worrying about whether I’d manage to sneak out again tonight, like I had last week. And wishing Rigel and I had made some kind of backup plan when we were together yesterday, in the cornfield. Why hadn’t we?

Oh, right. There was a lot of distracting kissing going on.

“What are you smirking about?” my aunt asked.

“Um, just remembering something Bri said at the game last night,” I improvised. I definitely needed to keep better control of my face when thinking about Rigel.

My aunt and uncle went up to bed at ten-thirty and I paced my bedroom floor until eleven, my impatience growing. I decided not to wait till midnight. Maybe Rigel would be able to get away early—and even if he couldn’t, I was too keyed up to stay in my room. I dressed in black jeans and dark top again, snuck out as quietly as I had last time, and reached the arboretum well before midnight without seeing another soul.

Voices were coming from Green’s Pub, a couple of blocks down Diamond—Saturday was karaoke night—but it was nothing to do with me. Still, I peered carefully down the street in both directions before sidling through the archway into the arboretum. Once there, I made my way to “our” bench and settled down to wait, since it was still only eleven-thirty.

But it wasn’t five minutes before I saw a shadow slip through the entrance, silhouetted briefly against the street lights down the block before it disappeared, moving softly toward me. Restraining my impulse to call out, I first extended my senses to see if I could “feel” Rigel—and I instantly did. No question.

“Rigel,” I whispered as he drew near, and heard his quick intake of breath. I guess he hadn’t been focusing his senses the way I had.

“M? I didn’t think you’d be here yet, but I couldn’t wait—”

“Yeah, me either.”

By then he’d reached me, and of course we ended up in each other’s arms for a few minutes before we attempted any further conversation. Then, with a sigh, we both sank down onto the bench, Rigel’s arm comfortably around my shoulders.

“So, any luck?” he asked first.

“Sort of.” I told him what I’d learned from my aunt that afternoon, including my sudden memory of my mother and my suspicions about what it meant.

He was silent for a long moment. “I’m sorry,” he finally said. “That must have been really hard for you.”