As Far as the Stars

by Virginia MacGregor

  He liked to argue with me about that stuff. About the things that I knew were true because they’d been proved by science, and the things he believed were true because he felt them.

  Neither of us ever won those arguments – we just got kind of worn out talking. A good worn out.

  I wish I could argue with him now.

  I wish I could tell him that if the universe really had a consciousness it would have made sure that he got on the plane to Nashville, the plane I’d booked. And it would have made sure that Christopher was in Oregon, with his dad.

  Unless it’s a screwed-up universe intent on hurting us. And I’m not willing to go there.

  I swim back to the edge of the pool, climb onto the rock and hold out my hand. Christopher blinks and I realise he’s not wearing his glasses, so I lean over closer. He grabs my fingers and I pull him out.

  He puts his glasses back on and we sit next to each other, staring at the pool. He’s shivering and his teeth start chattering. Thinking our clothes would dry off was probably a bit optimistic.

  Leda scrambles up too and shakes out her fur.

  I look up at the tall cliff face that stands above the waterhole and then stand up and hold my hand out to him again.

  ‘Come on, I’ve got an idea for something that will warm you up.’

  ‘We’re going back to the car?’

  I laugh. ‘Not even close.’

  I reach forward and ease off his glasses. ‘Probably best to leave these down here.’

  ‘I won’t be able to see where I’m going,’ he says. ‘And what do you mean – down here?’

  ‘You don’t need to see where you’re going; I’ll show you the way.’

  Before he has the chance to argue, I place his glasses down on a flat rock next to the pool, all the while keeping hold of his hand and then I guide him up a path between the rocks.

  ‘You know why my brother brought me here – the first time?’ I say.

  He waits for me to go on.

  ‘Because I was one of those scaredy-cat kids.’

  ‘I can’t imagine you being scared of anything,’ Christopher says.

  It makes me feel happy that he thinks that. I’ve worked my whole life on being brave. But it scares me too. Because if someone thinks you’re not scared, you kind of have to live up to that.

  ‘Oh, I was scared,’ I say.

  ‘What were you scared of?’ Christopher asks.

  I keep pulling him behind me.

  ‘Everything.’

  ‘Everything?’

  ‘Yeah. I was scared of other people. And dogs.’ I look over at Leda who hasn’t budged from her rock. ‘And of making new friends. And of big trucks. And loud noises. I was basically scared of every damned thing in the world.’ I pause. ‘I was even scared of those.’ I look up at the sky.

  He follows my gaze.

  ‘The stars?’

  I nod.

  ‘How they’re too far and too close all the same time. How we don’t know anything about them – not really. And I was scared of the sky too, how big it was. And the dark. And the moon. And what might be out there.’

  ‘You were scared of all the stuff you live for now?’

  I turn to face him. The stuff I live for – no one’s ever put it like that. Like they understand.

  ‘Why are you staring?’ he asks.

  ‘You’re pretty awesome, you know that, Christopher?’

  He blinks and looks down at his feet.

  ‘Come on, let’s keep going,’ I say, pulling his hand.

  ‘So, Blake brought you here as a kid because you were scared of stuff?’ Christopher asks.

  ‘Yeah, he told me that if I could do this, I could do anything. And that the next time I was scared – of the dark or making friends or loud noises – I should think back to this moment. He said I should think about how I’d done the scarier thing and about how brave I was, and then I wouldn’t need to be scared ever again, not about the small stuff.’ I stop walking, drop Christopher’s hand and look up at the top of the rock. ‘Blake taught me to be brave.’

  When I turn back to Christopher, he’s staring up at the rock too. I wonder how much he sees – whether it’s a blur to him or whether its sinking in, how high it is.

  ‘What did he get you to do then?’ Christopher asks.

  I look back up at the tallest rock above the hole.

  ‘Jump,’ I say.

  And then I take his hand again and drag him up the path.

  Chapter Seventeen

  23.50 CDT

  Looking down makes every bit of my body spin – like my cells are shooting around my body so fast that they’re going to burst through my skin.

  It’s good, to feel this alive.

  And terrifying.

  I look down at the rock where Leda’s waiting for us; from up here she’s a tiny speck. Occasionally, she lets out a yelp and it echoes around us. Jude stood in that same spot, that time we came here with her. She’d told Blake he was being stupid, taking me up here and she’d hated the fact that we’d ignored her and come up anyway. I wish that, just once, she’d joined us. That we could have jumped, the three of us.

  I look at Christopher. He’s standing really still. He’s staring at the drop.

  ‘Christopher?’

  ‘I can’t,’ he stutters, beside me.

  ‘Can’t or won’t?’ I say.

  ‘Both.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Seriously? Why? Because it’s dangerous. I can’t even see where we’re meant to land.’

  ‘It’s not dangerous. There hasn’t been an accident in like, for ever. And anyway, statistically, there are more chances of a meteor landing on your head than of you having an accident jumping from this rock.’

  He frowns. ‘That’s not even a real statistic.’

  ‘It should be.’

  He doesn’t look convinced.

  ‘Fine, it isn’t a statistic, but let’s put it this way: it’ll be quicker to jump than to walk back down. And safer.’ I smile. ‘It’s dangerous to walk down rocky paths. There isn’t a rail to hold onto. And you don’t have your glasses.’ I pause. ‘Anything could happen.’

  ‘Your brother’s right.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘FI. Totally F-ing Infuriating.’

  He smiles at me and then he looks down at the water. Slowly, I take his hand.

  ‘We can jump together,’ I say. ‘That’s what Blake and I did the first time.’

  And I know that although it’s going against every logical, sane, better-judgement-bone in his body, he squeezes my hand and says:

  ‘Okay.’

  With his hair lying flat and wet against his head, every angle of his face stands out, sharp and beautiful. I notice a constellation of freckles scattered across his nose and cheeks. Without his glasses, his face looks open and exposed.

  ‘Can you really not see anything?’ I ask. ‘Without your glasses.’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘Probably for the best,’ I laugh.

  ‘Hey!’

  ‘I’m joking. It’s going to be awesome.’

  I squeeze his hand back.

  And start counting:

  ‘One.’

  ‘Two,’ he says.

  ‘Three,’ we say together.

  And then, we jump.

  Chapter Eighteen

  23.58 CDT

  It comes back to me. How jumping from this rock is like the longest and slowest two seconds of my life.

  We bend our knees.

  Push into our legs.

  Our feet lose contact with the ground.

  And then, there’s a drop.

  A huge drop into the darkness below.

  For a moment, I’m suspended.

  The night air brushes against my skin.

  I hear an owl on a high branch. The grinding song of crickets in the long grass far below. The crashing of the waterfall.

  And I wait. I wait to fall.

  They say time’s relative. T
hat it stretches and contracts according to our perception. I guess that’s true: it feels like I’m living a whole lifetime in these two seconds.

  But there’s something more relative than time.

  Fear.

  Because the things you should be scared of, sometimes, they don’t even register.

  I should be scared that my feet have lost contact with this crazily high rock face – and that I haven’t got a clue where they’re going to land.

  I should be scared that I’ve talked Christopher into this when, much as I talked him into thinking it was safe, I don’t have a clue. Not really. I only have Blake’s words to go on and the time we jumped together. But anything could have gone wrong. We could have misjudged the angle. Jumped off from the wrong spot.

  I should be scared because it’s so dark that I can’t see a thing – not the pool below or the sky above or even the guy I’m flying through the air with.

  I should be scared that we’re in the middle of nowhere. If we end up splattered on the rocks below it would take a good few hours before anyone finds us. Days, even.

  Yeah, those things should scare the shit out of me.

  But they don’t. Not really.

  Because however scary it is, it’s nothing compared to what’s going on out there in the world.

  And I’m holding his hand.

  A guy’s hand that isn’t Blake or my dad.

  A guy I’ve just met.

  A guy I basically don’t know anything about besides the scraps he’s given me about his mom and dad and the weird life he’s had and how, somehow, he’s not as cut up about his dad being on the plane as he should be.

  But he’s more than that too. He’s the guy who’s sat next to me for hundreds of miles already. Miles I would have had to get through on my own. A guy who’s shy and strong and weird and basically a stranger but whose hand in mine feels like it could hold me through anything.

  The further we fall, the tighter we hold on to each other.

  And I don’t want to let go.

  I want time to stop still.

  I want these two seconds to last for ever.

  DAY 2

  SUNDAY 20TH AUGUST, 2017

  Chapter Nineteen

  00.01 CDT

  For a second, I feel every one of his fingers laced between mine – we’re holding onto each other so tight that I’m not sure we’ll ever be able to pull them apart again.

  And then the water smacks our skin and we sink down under the surface.

  The force of being pulled down into the swimming hole yanks our hands apart.

  We come up coughing and spluttering and laughing and it’s like in those few moments as we dropped through the sky, every bit of me was transformed – like all my cells renewed themselves in fast-forward and that I’m not the same person in this rock pool now as I was, standing up there on the ledge.

  I cry out – from relief and exhaustion and out of a longing for everything to be okay. For me. For Christopher. For all those people who are waiting for news about the plane.

  My cry echoes between the rocks around the pool.

  Leda starts barking. I see her standing on the rock, wagging her tail, waiting for us to come out.

  ‘You did it, Christopher,’ I say, climbing out.

  I get his glasses and hand them to him. He puts them back on and then stands there, like his body’s still in shock. His legs are shaking. From the cold. From the jump. From what we just did together. But he looks more solid, somehow, more there.

  Leda comes and sits on his feet and rubs her head against his shins, like she’s trying to say well done too.

  ‘It works, right?’ I say. ‘Now you don’t need to be scared of anything ever again.’

  He doesn’t answer.

  ‘It was amazing – at least give me that?’ I prompt.

  ‘Yeah,’ he smiles. A big, open smile. ‘It was amazing.’

  We stand there, our bodies adjusting to being out of the water; to not being in freefall.

  ‘Come on, let’s get back on the road.’

  He nods, but from how slowly he walks, his clothes dripping around him, I can tell he’s still in a daze.

  When we get back to the car I realise that the only bit of spare clothing I have with me are the two dresses scrunched up in the back seat. Mom and Dad took the rest of my stuff down for me a few days ago – Mom had pointed out that, with Blake’s guitar and his suitcase, there wouldn’t be much room in the Buick.

  ‘You got any spare clothes?’ I ask.

  He looks at me bewildered.

  I nod at his massive backpack. ‘Just until my shorts and T-shirt dry? And you should probably get changed too.’

  ‘Oh – right.’ He opens his bag and starts pulling clothes out.

  Everything’s carefully folded. Not a wrinkle in sight.

  ‘You iron your T-shirts?’

  You iron anything, I’m thinking?

  His cheeks go pink.

  ‘They don’t take up as much space when they’re ironed,’ he says. ‘If I only have my backpack, I don’t have to wait at baggage reclaim.’

  He makes it sound like he spends his entire life travelling. I guess his dad must drag him around on his business trips.

  ‘Sounds like you’ve given it a lot of thought,’ I say.

  ‘Dad taught me,’ he goes on. ‘How to pack only what I needed. And to use the space efficiently – not to leave any gaps.’ His stares out of the windscreen at the dark pines. ‘We’d compete, to see who could pack the lightest.’

  I think about those paper models he makes, all those perfect folds. I wonder whether his whole life has been about that: folding everything up into small, neat little parcels. Not getting in anyone’s way. It’s kind of impressive. But sad too.

  ‘Blake could have taken a few lessons from you,’ I say. ‘He travels with so much junk.’

  I pick up one of his T-shirts and hold it up to my nose. ‘God, I love the smell of laundry.’

  ‘And it’s not just the space-saving thing,’ Christopher goes on, his mind obviously still on his dad. ‘Before I went to boarding school, he taught me how to wash and iron. He has a thing about being well turned out, about his uniform being pristine.’ He pauses and looks at me like he’s expecting me to say something.

  ‘Mom’s like that – she’s always smart when she goes to work,’ I say. ‘Jude’s the same. Dad’s got this whole scruffy professor thing going on and Blake wears ripped, faded stuff and as for me, I kind of just put on whatever’s clean. Once I’m in space I’ll be wearing a spacesuit anyway, so there’s not much point investing in fashion. But I understand. Why some people think it’s important.’

  Christopher nods. ‘Dad says that if you take care of your clothes, it makes people trust you.’ He pauses again. ‘It makes people feel safe.’ His voice goes wobbly. And he catches my eye again.

  ‘He sounds like a good guy,’ I say.

  ‘Yeah,’ he says, biting his bottom lip.

  I feel like there’s more he wants to tell me. Like this is the first time he’s ever opened up about his life and his dad and that now he’s started he wants to carry on, because it feels good not to hold all that stuff inside. There are millions of things about him I don’t know – and probably never will. But I’m guessing he’s probably shared more with me in the last twelve hours than he has with anyone else his whole life. I wait for a beat to see if he’ll go on but he doesn’t say anything else.

  I take a pair of Christopher’s boxer shorts and place them on top of the T-shirt.

  ‘Can I borrow these?’

  ‘Sure… I guess…’

  ‘Thanks.’

  I scoot out of the car and go and get changed behind a clump of bushes.

  When I come back I put my wet clothes on the back bench to dry. From the corner of my eye I see that the box with Blake’s hat has slipped into the footwell and that his suit is all crumpled up. I reach back and straighten it out. It won’t be perfect – not to Mom’s standar
ds – but at this point I don’t care. Blake showing up on time, that’s all that matters.

  I turn back to Christopher. He’s changed too – he’s put on a pair of jeans and he’s got a T-shirt over the top, which is basically the same as mine except mine is grey, his is white.

  ‘Give me your wet clothes,’ I say.

  He hands them over and I place them next to mine on the back bench.

  As I walk around the car, I can feel him looking at me and it does feel weird, wearing his clothes. But kind of nice too. I’ve always preferred boys’ clothes. How neutral they are. And comfortable. I didn’t want to wear clothes that made the boys at school look at me like I was one of the girly girls; like I couldn’t join in with what they were doing. I wanted to be one of them. I’ve never minded being a girl but I do mind being told that I have to look a certain way. Anyway, thinking back, I guess it must have made Jude sad, that I wasn’t a little sister she could play dolls and dress up with. I guess that’s why it’s important to her that I wear a dress for her wedding.

  I pull up the roof of the convertible, get into the driver’s seat and close the doors. Then I switch the heaters on. The car smells of dusty air and dog fur and pond water, which is kind of comforting.

  I notice a tiny sketchbook on the front bench, smaller than the palm of my hand. Christopher pulled it out at the same time as the clothes. It’s flipped open to a page filled with pictures of buildings. Weird, angular shapes. All glass and steel.

  ‘What are these?’ I ask, picking up the pad.

  ‘Oh, nothing.’

  ‘They don’t look like nothing.’

  ‘They’re only sketches.’

  ‘Sketches of what?’

  ‘Pulkovo International Airport,’ he says quickly. ‘St. Petersburg.’

  ‘You really have been everywhere.’

  He hesitates and then nods. ‘Sort of, yeah.’

  I look back at his sketchpad. The drawings are really good. Like something you’d expect an architect to do.

  ‘You like to draw airports, then?’

  ‘I draw sketches before I make some of my more complicated models – to get the shape and the dimensions right.’ He sounds kind of excited and embarrassed at the same time. ‘Though sometimes I don’t know what I’m going to make before I start. I kind of get this twitch in my fingers and after a few folds, I begin to get clues. Sometimes I don’t work it out right until the end.’ He’s speaking so fast, he has to stop and take a breath. ‘Sometimes I never work it out – the model just ends up being some weird abstract thing.’