The Stars in the Sky (Giving You ... #2)
Read The Stars in the Sky (Giving You ... #2) Online
Authors: Leslie McAdam
Photograph of Mitchell Wick, book cover model, copyright Cory Stierley, used with permission.
Cover design by Michele Catalano Creative.
Interior formatting by
Pink Ink Designs
.
Editing by L Woods LLC.
Copyright © 2016 by Leslie McAdam.
All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to actual living or dead persons, businesses, events, or locales is purely coincidental.
DEDICATION
This book is dedicated to my children, Joseph and Fiona.
May you always live in a world where people love one another and see beyond the names we call each other. May you and your children and your children’s children grow up in a world where people care about the next generation and always want to make it better for the future.
And may you never read past this page of this book.
“Every atom in your body came from a star that exploded. And, the atoms in your left hand probably came from a different star than your right hand. It really is the most poetic thing I know about physics: You are all stardust.”—Lawrence M. Krauss
Acknowledgements
I wish to express my appreciation to those who specifically helped with this book, including: Heather “Here, have a dick pic” Roberts; Maxine “I want to read Will’s threesome” Donner; Meghan “I really think there should be bug zappers on the ranch” Clark; Little “:]” Dude; Summer “Write a story about a girl named Summer” Graystone; Mary “Will you be my beta forever?” Carr (of Romazing Reader); Jerica “No commas for you” MacMillan; Kristy Lin “Marie sounds like a twelve-year-old boy, oh and by the way my wife likes to look over my shoulder at the hot men on your Facebook page” Billuni (of www.sexygrammar.com); Cassy “Goddess” Roop (of Pink Ink Designs); Michele “Also Goddess” Catalano (of Michele Catalano Creative); Cory “I like to throw you off your game” Stierley; Mitchell “I’m serious about the McLaren, dude” Wick; and the team at Social Butterfly PR.
I am so grateful to my family and friends for support, whether I sit down with you for lunch or connect with you online.
I love you all.
First Impressions
GOD, I REALLY HAD to pee.
Only ten more minutes to go until I got there.
Come on, come on, come on.
I willed my car to go faster as I zoomed down a country road out in the middle of nowhere. The last thing I wanted was to have to stop and find a bush. I squeezed my thighs together. Since it was a hot June day and I had on denim short-shorts, this just made me sticky and sweaty. Not helping.
It also didn't help that my body was vibrating with excitement from anticipation for my new adventure this summer. That just made me all the more uncomfortable. Gah! When would I get there?
The time of arrival on my GPS app ticked down to nine more minutes.
I pressed the gas pedal down harder. I drove an old Mercedes sedan that had been converted to biodiesel, so I should probably call it the accelerator rather than the gas pedal. California lacks proper public transit (a perennial item on my crusade list), so you have to drive everywhere. I did my best to cut down on my use of fossil fuels. Leftover vegetable oil from Chinese restaurants powered my car and I proudly advertised its alternative fuel source on the back window in big green lettering. It always smelled like kitchen grease wherever I went, but I'd do anything for the environment.
This morning, eager and wired, with my car packed up for the summer, I stopped by the new Santa Barbara location of Southwinds Coffee, the local coffee chain owned by Ryan Fielding, the boyfriend of my best friend, Amelia Crowley. He happened to be working there when I stopped in, so I chatted with him while they made me the most unbelievable coffee. Ryan knows that I'm vegan, so I didn't even need to say that my coffee needed to have non-GMO soy milk and organic coffee beans. He just checked the boxes and handed it to the barista, then smiled at me and asked me about my summer internship.
Boy, he was cute. Yes, he was my best friend's surfer hottie, and they were totally devoted to each other, and I'd never get in the way of that, but I also had eyes and it was impossible not to stare. The fact that I was looking at him, though, probably meant that I seriously needed to get laid.
I couldn't think about that at the moment. All I could think about was that I really shouldn't have ordered the ginormous soy latte.
Seven minutes to go. Now I bounced along a dirt road. The ruts and ribs in the road did nothing good for my bladder.
I didn't know if I'd make it. I felt like a little kid. The bushes on the side of the road were starting to look mighty tempting.
I was driving to Headlands Ranch, my temporary home and job site for the summer. For the past year, I'd been going to school at the University of California at Santa Barbara, getting an advanced degree in Counseling Psychology. I wanted to help people, especially kids. I’d gone back to college after graduating ten years ago, keeping my job as a preschool teacher at a progressive school during the day, and going to school at night. Although I wasn't sure where I wanted to end up, either setting up my own practice or working somewhere, I planned on becoming a therapist.
Hence my interest in this unique counseling job at Headlands.
I'd found Headlands Ranch on the internet after I saw an internship posting on Craigslist. From its website, I learned that Headlands was run by the fourth generation of an old California farming family, with William Charles Thrash, III, now in charge.
Sounded like a stiff old man.
Located on California's Central Coast, about halfway between Los Angeles and San Francisco, north of Santa Barbara near Santa Ynez, it was beautiful. I absolutely loved this part of the world, less than an hour's drive from my apartment in Santa Barbara, where gentle, rolling hills met the Pacific Ocean.
As I drove looking around at the farmland, it felt like a homecoming. My dad had been a migrant farmworker, my mother, an activist. Affected by the progressive politics of César Chávez, my mother, a tall, blonde German, wandered out into the fields one summer to pick grapes to feel how it felt. I get my crusading nature from her.
She met my dad and fell hard, and they worked side by side that summer. Handsome and unusually tall, my father grew up traveling up and down California's Central Valley with his parents, immigrants from Mexico. Unwilling to leave each other, they got married, had me and my siblings, and my mom followed my dad into the fields. They followed the seasons, picking vegetables, fruit, and nuts. Until I was in the third grade, we never stayed in one place for more than three months, and we always lived in agricultural areas like this. I grew up moving from camp to camp, staying in farmworker housing, which was normally utilitarian and small, but clean.
My father had grown up with his head in a book and despite the constant moving, he cobbled together an education, earning a high school diploma. My grandparents weren't particularly supportive, believing that you needed to work hard and make money—school just got in the way. Nevertheless, he banked the coals of a dream of becoming a teacher. After he was married and had kids, my mom gave oxygen to his dream by talking about it in a way that made him believe he could do it despite his upbringing and despite our circumstances. And after a while, she talked him into getting a college degree from a community college, and later a full degree and a teaching credential. She got one too and became a Spanish teacher. And so eventually he became a high school teacher, working at my mom's rival school and settling down.
But those years of constantly moving, living out of an old army rucksack with my idealistic parents, meant that I never really got to know anyone and I got constantly uprooted. Sure, we’d run into acquaintances as we moved from place to place. There was a community. But I didn't have any consistent friends, at least not as a small child. Like a military kid, I got really good at making friends quickly, the kind of friends for right now, not forever. And as I got older, I learned to be the life of the party. But I never really had any consistent friends until Amelia, who I met in third grade. Even though I’d lived in Santa Barbara since then, I still had the belief that I was going to have to move on at any time.
This latest adventure was another part of this pattern of moving on to the next thing.