The Prettiest Star

by Carter Sickels

  I come in third. Coach tells me it was my best time all season. “By the time you’re a senior, you’ll be unstoppable,” she says.

  Shivering, I pull on my sweatshirt and walk over to the sidelines. Nobody seems to be giving my brother a second glance—they’re all caught up in their own kids’ performances. Maybe they don’t know who he is, or maybe they just don’t care.

  “There she is!” Mamaw gives me a big hug. It’s taken me a while to get used to her gray hair. She looks like any other grandmother now, except she’s still bedazzled in her jewelry. Her rings and bracelets and a beaded necklace shine in the autumn light.

  My mother congratulates me, and says she doesn’t know where I get my stamina from as she stands behind Brian, ready to push him wherever he needs to go. Nobody mentions the wheelchair.

  “Good job, sis,” Brian says, almost a whisper.

  Barely visible under all of the layers, he’s bundled in a thick hunting jacket that Mamaw says used to belong to her husband. There is a black toboggan snug on his head, and a purpled checkered scarf that Andrew brought him wound around his neck. He also has on a pair of sunglasses that Annie sent from New York. The sparkling silver frames and mirrored lenses look goofy and too big for his skeleton-like face. Even though it doesn’t seem like anyone’s paying attention to us, I’m still on guard, waiting for someone to call him a name or yell something.

  Coach comes over. “Didn’t Jess do a great job?”

  “Kicked ass,” my brother says.

  “You must be Brian.”

  “The one and only.”

  “Good to meet you,” she says.

  She shakes his hand like he’s not sitting in a wheelchair, like she has no idea that he is the man with AIDS.

  “Nice to meet you too,” Brian says.

  My father comes over and pats me on the back and tells me he’s proud of me, but doesn’t say anything to Brian or Mom, or Mamaw, just gives them a kind of sad smile, and I smell the beer and feel a stab of embarrassment. Then he stands back, hands in pockets, alone. Brian may be watching him, it’s hard to tell because of the big sunglasses hiding his eyes. I wonder what he thinks, watching me run while he sits in that chair. He used to be the athlete of the family, but he’ll never run again. He’ll never do much of anything again.

  The bell rings and I head to the cafeteria. My mother used to pack my lunch for me every morning, but since she’s been staying at my grandmother’s, I fend for myself. I usually bring a peanut butter sandwich and eat it in the gym, sitting high up in the bleachers, as far away as I can get, but this morning I woke up late and didn’t have time to make a lunch, so my father gave me a few dollars to buy one.

  The cafeteria is crowded and smells like too many different kinds of foods cooking together in a gigantic microwave. I wait in the long à la carte line, keeping my head down. I should have just bought a pack of peanut butter crackers from the vending machine and gone to the gym. I don’t know how to act around the other kids anymore. They all seem so young, like badly behaved children. I miss Nick—if he were here, we could hang out by the trees on the other side of the playground, smoking cigarettes and skipping class, growing up.

  Wendy Rooper gets in line behind me. She smiles, showing dimples on either cheek like a baby doll’s. “Did you study for our Spanish test?” she asks. Her voice is girly and high. I don’t know if she’s ever spoken to me before.

  “Not really.”

  “Me either.”

  The line moves along. Up ahead, the cafeteria workers, old women in white polyester uniforms, stand behind the counter, serving pizza slices, hamburgers, or grilled cheese sandwiches. When we’re closer, about five people from the front, Wendy and I each take a green plastic tray from the stack. Then I hear a low mooing. Wendy hears it too—her cheeks and neck flush, and she looks down at her pudgy hands, but she can’t hide. Brett Wilson and Mike Kirby pass by the end of the long line, heading in our direction. They moo again, cracking themselves up.

  “Hey, Wendy, thanks for letting us cut the line,” Brett says, stepping in front of her, and Mike pats her on the butt, and they laugh again. Wendy doesn’t look at either of them. She deals with this every day. Everyone pretends not to notice.

  A blue hot flame grows in my throat. The tray feels heavy in my hands.

  Brett elbows Mike. “Oh, look who it is. The faggot’s sister,” he says, but then he gets distracted by Angie Ray and Carrie Driggs coming over, laughing about something. “Hey, girls.”

  Angie and Carrie join Brett and Mike, think nothing of ditching us in line. I’m surprised Brandy White isn’t with them. Carrie doesn’t even glance at me. She’s grown out her hair and wears it bigger now, the sculpted bangs held securely in place with layers of candy-scented hairspray. Over the summer, Carrie climbed her way up into the popular girl crowd, leaving Molly behind. But even Molly won’t associate with me. Nobody speaks to me or sits with me. I don’t care.

  “We were just about to ask these girls out on dates,” Brett says, and Angie glances at Wendy and me, and rolls her eyes.

  “Please,” she snorts, and they crack up.

  As Carrie reaches for a tray, she pushes into me. “Hey, don’t touch me,” she says.

  “I didn’t.”

  “You shouldn’t even be here,” she says loudly. “You’re going to get your germs all over the food. Are you trying to give us AIDS?”

  Brett and Mike howl, and Carrie smiles, proud of herself. Wendy looks at the floor. She wants to disappear too, but she’s too big. One of the cafeteria workers yells at us to keep the line moving.

  “You can’t catch it like that, you idiot,” I say.

  “What?” Carries turns back around, and now they’re all watching. My fingers curl around the edges of the plastic tray.

  “I said, you can’t catch it like that.”

  “Oh, right. You can only get it from butt sex.”

  Carrie opens her mouth and brays an ugly laugh, and Brett and Mike slap high fives. Wendy Rooper glances at me. She’s taken years of this.

  As Carrie turns toward the cooks, I drop my tray and it clatters to the floor. All the tautness lets loose, and power curls into my hands. Enraged, I grab Carrie. She shrieks, and then we’re on the floor. She’s trying to hit me, but I pin her down and slap her across her red face and she screams louder. The heat pulses in my head. I can’t see anything, just a blur, but I sense the crowd growing around us—watching, hollering, making bets. Carrie struggles under me and then as someone pulls me off of her, I’m swinging my fists. “Calm down, calm down,” Coach says in my ear. I close my eyes, and let myself be led.

  As I wait in the principal’s office, the secretary, Mrs. Taylor, keeps looking over the top of her glasses at me, nervous I’m going to bolt. Behind the closed door, the principal and Coach talk about me. Maybe I’ll be expelled. It doesn’t matter. Mrs. Taylor taps the typewriter keys. A kid comes in and hands her a doctor’s note, and then writes his name on the sign-in sheet. My body twitches with the desire to run until my muscles give out.

  When I’m called into the office, I don’t hear most of what they say. Principal Gleason stands with crossed arms, and Coach pats me like she’s comforting a wild animal. I hear the word “parents.” I hear the word “control.” I hear the word “apologize.” I refuse to answer their questions.

  Principal Gleason sends me to the guidance counselor.

  “Jessie, come in.” Josh Clay closes the door behind me. He motions for me to sit in one of the empty chairs, but I shake my head. There isn’t much to look at. A desk covered with files, bookshelves. A globe of the world. Pictures of Josh and wife and baby. Fluorescent lighting. Boring beige walls.

  Josh sits down in the chair behind his desk and looks up at me with a fake teacher smile. “Jessie, please, take a seat.”

  “I don’t want to,” I say.

  He’s wearing a white collar shirt under a maroon sweater and gray pleated slacks. He’s grown his spiky hair out, and wears it par
ted to the side, like his father. His smile fades.

  “Jessie, listen. I know things are hard right now. But you can’t just go around beating people up.”

  “She started it!”

  Josh picks up a pen and clicks it several times. He wants me to sit and chat with him, tell him all my problems, like other kids do, but it’s different between us. I remember his hand on my knee. He tricked me into telling him about Brian.

  “Are you going to suspend me or expel me or what?”

  “No, no. Nothing like that. Principal Gleason understands this is a… unique situation.”

  When he stands up, the pleats fall out of his slacks. “I want you to talk to me. Stop carrying around all this pain.”

  There is a picture of Josh in high school, posed in his baseball uniform and holding a bat. Brian was the best player on the team. Now he’s at my grandmother’s, in a wheelchair, face slick with sweat and pain and fear.

  “You’re going to have to apologize to Carrie.”

  “No way.”

  He folds his arms. “Jessie.”

  “It’s Jess,” I correct him. “Can I go or what?”

  “Listen,” he softens his tone. “Have you thought about coming back to youth group? I think it would be good for you.”

  “This is a public school. You’re not even supposed to be talking about church.”

  He starts to laugh, he thinks I’m joking, but then his expression changes—a hard crease appears in his forehead, his eyes flash. I don’t know how I ever thought he was cute.

  “You’re lost, Jessie. But I pray you’ll see the light again.”

  “Whatever, dickhead.”

  The door slams behind me, and he doesn’t come after me. I feel invincible, not invisible. I walk past the long line of lockers. The bell clangs and everyone spills out into the hall. I hold my head up. Nobody yells anything, nobody says a word. But they all see me. I’m the killer whale gliding through the halls.

  Sharon

  I stand behind the wheelchair, waiting for Brian to come out of the bathroom. He’s been in there a long time, refusing my help. He doesn’t want me to see his tortured, emaciated body, prefers Andrew to help him with these kinds of things—getting dressed, bathing. But Andrew can’t be here every day. Whenever Brian has to rely on me, his embarrassment and seething anger tighten around him like a lasso, making him difficult to reach.

  When he finally comes out, he doesn’t even glance at me. I help him back into the chair. Though I’ve done this often, I’m still surprised by how light he is. He’s lost so much weight, down to 111 pounds. A husk. I want to massage fat back into him, to flesh out his face, to return the strong strings of muscle to his shriveled legs and arms.

  I push the wheelchair into the living room, where his bed is. Lettie has hung some of Brian’s pictures on the walls to make him feel more at home. The one of him and Shawn at the beach, arms around each other—best of friends, but more than that. What was it like to lose him, when they were both so young? Brian sometimes stares at the picture, says Shawn’s name, a prayer. There’s a picture of Annie looking like she’s posing for the cover of some trashy magazine: unzipped leather jacket over a lacy bra-like shirt, hair teased, a cigarette between her lips. And, in a thick brass frame, Lettie’s most prized photo: Lettie, Brian, and Naomi with their arms around each other, Naomi’s famous signature in the corner.

  “I don’t want to lay down,” Brian says.

  “Do you want to watch TV?”

  He nods. I take him into the family room, and help him get out of chair and into the recliner. Though he’s shockingly weak, he’s still clear-headed, and this is encouraging.

  He squints at the television. “Sometimes it hurts my eyes to watch,” he says. “Makes me dizzy.”

  It’s a commercial for ketchup. The bottle tips, and thick, red blobs fall onto a sizzling hamburger patty.

  “Do you want me to turn it off?” I ask.

  “No. Leave it,” he says.

  The furnace kicks on with a thump. Already, I can barely breathe it’s so stuffy in here, but Brian’s always cold. Lettie keeps the heat turned high for him. He wears sweatpants and a sweatshirt, white cotton socks, and a heavy velour robe that Andrew gave him. I arrange a blanket over his legs and feet. I’ve been thinking about what Andrew said.

  “Brian, honey.”

  He turns his giant blue eyes on me. The illness has changed the shape of his face—sunken, concave cheeks, and everything else too big: his nose, his mouth, his eyes, his protruding forehead. His once-pretty blond hair has grown thin and coarse and lackluster, the color of yard dirt.

  “Is there anything I should know? About what you want?” I stroke his delicate hand lightly, don’t want to cause any pain. He blinks several times. “I mean, if you go back into the hospital, is there anything—”

  “DNR,” he says.

  The letters at first mean nothing, then I understand. Heat zips through my body like a current. Goddamn—I want to yell, to curse, but all I can do is nod.

  “There’s a tape,” he says.

  “What?”

  “You’ll see it. Next to my bed in my room. Watch it. Watch it after—”

  He stops talking and a hoarse sob escapes my throat, and I’m embarrassed—crying when he is the one who must be terrified. What goes through his mind? Everything is slipping out of his grasp—strength, words, time—and I don’t know what he needs. His father? Travis hasn’t been over here in three or four days, and Brian hasn’t asked for him.

  “It’s going to be okay,” I tell him. “It’ll be okay.”

  Later, while Lettie watches soaps and Brian sleeps, I go back to the house. It’s the middle of the day, and Travis isn’t home. Jess is at cross country practice. Thankfully, she wasn’t suspended from the team after her squabble at school. “We’re giving her another chance,” her coach told me. “But she needs to talk to someone.” Who? I thought, didn’t ask. Both Travis and I went in to meet with the principal, the coach, and Josh Clay. It was the most time we’ve spent together in months. Side-by-side, pretending to be fine.

  “I know how hard this is,” Don Gleason, the principal, started.

  I didn’t want to hear his excuses. “You said you’d keep an eye out, to make sure kids aren’t making fun of her.”

  “Sharon, we can’t watch her every second,” Josh Clay said, and I resented him calling me by my first name, just as I resented Travis reaching out and touching my arm, as if to silence me.

  “We’ll talk to her,” Travis said.

  We didn’t. We got in separate vehicles, drove to separate places. When I saw Jess at Lettie’s, I asked her if she wanted to stay home from school.

  “They won’t bother me anymore,” she said, and that was the end of the discussion.

  I open the door to Brian’s room. A poster has fallen off the wall, and I unfurl it. I know the singer only because Brian used to be so obsessed. Wild makeup, over-the-top flamboyant clothes. I study his catlike face. He’s handsome and pretty and strange. He stares back—one light blue eye and one brown—as if he’s judging me, blaming me for the state of things. He’s right, I think.

  When I raise the blinds to let in the afternoon light, it shines over a layer of dust on the lamp and dresser and shelves. The baseball trophies are gone—I wonder what Brian did with them—but the photographs of his friends still hang on the wall next to the bed. Brian has told me stories about these men: they were fired from their jobs, evicted from apartments, abandoned by their families. I look at their faces, caught in time. It’s not your fault. They look back at me. How many are dead? All of them.

  I run upstairs and return with a roll of Scotch tape. Who cares if it strips the paint off the walls? Why did I ever worry about such stupid things? Taking my time, I carefully reattach the poster of David Bowie and smooth out the wrinkles.

  I stop putting off what I came here for. The box of VHS tapes sits next to the bed waiting for me. One day, maybe I’ll watch them all
. Travis believed that Brian missed his chance for a better life by not pursuing baseball, but Lettie always knew he was born to do something else—something beautiful, artistic, imaginative. God’s given him a gift, she said. I should have listened to her, should have encouraged him to follow his dreams.

  The tape sits on top of the stack, impossible to miss. WATCH AFTER MY DEATH written on the label in red permanent marker. After. I should have done more, I think. If I’d been more accepting. If I’d visited him in New York. If, if, if. I sit on the edge of the bed, which I finally made the day Lettie called from the hospital. Before that, when I didn’t know where Brian had gone or if I’d ever see him again, I’d left the bed as he had, a mess of covers and sheets that still smelled like him.

  Chilled, I rub my arms. It’s too cold and quiet—not just this room, but the house itself. I don’t want to be here. I want to be back at Lettie’s, to be around people, to be with my son.

  The poster’s edges start to curl. One side slides down from the wall, the rock star’s face tilting, then upside down. As I watch him fall, my body explodes, and a scream shatters the silence.

  I tear the comforter free and yank the sheets out from under the corners. It’s a relief, a terrifying joy. I’m a wild woman making a mess—stripping the bed, throwing blankets on the floor, pounding the mattress with my fists. I hit it again and again. I hate everything in this room, everything in this house.

  Exhausted, sobbing, I collapse, and as I reach for the wadded up blankets, hugging them to me and trying to hold onto something, to keep my son from leaving this terrible, beautiful world, the rock star looks up at me from the floor not with judgment but something else, understanding, or maybe, I hope, forgiveness.

  Jess is on the phone. “It’s Annie,” she says. “She wants to visit.”

  “Oh, good,” Lettie exclaims. “Tell her we have plenty of room.”

  “Mamaw said to tell you we have plenty of room,” Jess says, then a minute later, she says goodbye and puts the phone back in the cradle.

  “When is she coming?” I ask.