Starfish

by Akemi Dawn Bowman

  I lunge for the door.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Walking through the hallway feels like I’m walking through a mirrored tunnel in a fun house. The walls don’t stay up the way they’re supposed to. I’m dizzy, and it makes me feel weak.

  I squeeze the bottom of my shirt in my hands and try to ignore the pounding in my chest.

  I need to get to the front door. I need to get to my car. I need to go home.

  “You’re still here,” Jamie says when I emerge in the living room. It’s not hard to spot him because he’s like a unicorn among donkeys. Nobody else is anywhere near as beautiful. Even the girl sitting on the couch next to him—with her perfect side braid and about five layers of lip gloss—gets lost to the blur that surrounds him. “I thought you went home already.”

  My mouth feels like it’s stuffed with cotton balls. It’s too hard to concentrate, so I just shake my head.

  His smile fades a little because he’s studying me. Everything about me shifts—my eyes, my feet, my hands—everything about me screams something isn’t right.

  “I thought you didn’t drink,” he says, and his smile returns a little bit.

  “I’m not—” I mumble. “I don’t—” I try to swallow the cotton away. “I’m going home. I don’t feel great.”

  “Did you drive here?”

  I nod too many times. I need to get out of this house.

  He’s watching me the way someone would watch an injured cat—not wanting to leave it alone but scared to get too close too quickly. “Are you okay?” His eyes darken with concern.

  I feel my jaw shake. I nod once.

  He stands up and his lip-glossed companion keeps her eyes glued to the two of us. “I can give you a ride home if you’re not feeling well. My car is right outside.”

  “No,” I blurt out, and he looks startled. “I mean, thanks, but I can’t leave my car here. My mom would kill me.”

  The skin in between his eyes scrunches deeply. “Okay. Well, at least let me walk you out. You look like you’re about to pass out.”

  The girl with the braid and lip gloss stands up. “I’m going to get another drink. See you out back?”

  Jamie nods. “I’ll just be a minute.”

  I start to object—I even think of trying to find Emery. But I don’t want to stay here any longer. I want to go home. My stomach is rotating in so many directions I think I’m going to be sick.

  “See you later, Kelly.”

  I glance over my shoulder—Adam is standing outside the hallway with sleepy eyes and an unlit cigarette in his hand.

  Oh my God, I can’t believe I let a smoker kiss me. I want to claw off my own face.

  I ignore Jamie even though I’m sure he’s staring at me. When we’re standing in front of my car, I dig through my bag clumsily until I find the keys. When I pull them out, the metal glint of the Batman key chain dangles from my fist. It catches my eye. It catches Jamie’s, too.

  I feel myself shrinking into the ground.

  “It’s weird seeing you again,” Jamie says all of a sudden. The corner of his mouth dimples when he smirks. “You look the same, but . . . different.”

  I’m shaking, and I can’t tell if it’s the aftershocks of the horrible kiss with Adam, or if it’s because Jamie Merrick is standing in front of me with the streetlight pouring across his face like a moonlit mask. His eyes are such a piercing blue. They stand out even more because he has thick, heavy eyebrows. On anyone else, his eyebrows would look like a Muppet character. But on him, they don’t look weird—his face just makes sense, quirks and all. Maybe because he’s always made so much sense to me.

  “Yeah, I guess that’s what time does to you,” I say lamely.

  Jamie looks like he wants to say so much more. It wasn’t always awkward between us. We used to be effortless together.

  Maybe time has something to do with that, too.

  I straighten myself up.

  I want to ask him why he stopped talking to me. I want to ask him why we didn’t stay friends forever, when we promised each other we would.

  I want to ask him what happened after he moved away that turned us into strangers.

  But I don’t have the time or the courage.

  “Well, I hope you feel better. It was nice to see you again.” He presses his lips together and looks down at his feet. When he brings his face back up, he looks at me the way I feel—like something inside of him aches. “Good-bye, Kiko.”

  Good-bye. Not good night. Why does it feel so final?

  “Good-bye, Jamie.” I turn for the car door, and when I look back over my shoulder, he’s already making his way back to the house and his pretty friend inside.

  I don’t know what any of it means, but it doesn’t matter. I feel weightless.

  • • •

  I paint a girl with wings instead of arms, flying along the border where darkness becomes light, unsure of where she’s supposed to be.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Emery calls to ask why I disappeared last night. At first I think she’s mad about it, but then I realize she’s just groggy and hungover. I try to tell her about Adam and Jamie, but both stories are on such drastically different ends of the emotional spectrum that I can’t seem to get the words out without downplaying one or the other.

  Kissing Adam was horrible.

  Seeing Jamie again made the world feel whole.

  So I don’t tell Emery about any of it. I push my thoughts into a small corner of my brain to deal with later, and I ask about her night instead.

  I spend the weekend working on my portfolio. I fill four pages of sketches until I settle on a painting of a woman with a shaved head dancing in a swirl of fire. It takes a long time because there are about a hundred layers of fire all around her. It keeps me busy until Monday morning, so I don’t have to think about kissing Adam. It also keeps me from thinking about Jamie’s probably-girlfriend.

  But it doesn’t keep me from thinking about Jamie. He is literally all I think about, even when I’m painting, and usually painting is how I shut out the rest of the world. It’s my sanctuary from the thoughts that cloud my head.

  But with each burst of color on the canvas, I see dark eyelashes and blue eyes, dimples and a gentle smile, and light radiating from his olive skin, like he’s secretly a star that fell down to earth by accident.

  By Monday morning, I forget about everything but Jamie.

  Until I see Adam at school.

  He’s standing near his locker, hiding a pack of cigarettes in between a folder covered in black Sharpie drawings and an English textbook. My nerves are making me feel sick—I don’t know if he’ll even remember me or what happened, but I also don’t know how he’ll act if he does.

  Part of me wants to just get our inevitable encounter over with, but as it turns out the universe isn’t interested in what I want, because Adam doesn’t notice me by the lockers at all.

  Later on, in government, I feel like there are tiny bugs crawling all over my body. It’s so hard to sit still. I pick my nails under the desk because it’s only a matter of time before I see him now. I’m nervous to speak to him for the first time since that night.

  He walks in with his friend, and when he sees me, his smile disappears like someone’s erased it from his face.

  He spends the rest of class looking embarrassed and avoiding any direct eye contact with me, intentional or otherwise.

  He is embarrassed of me.

  Of course.

  I feel angry. Really, really angry.

  I spend the next two classes on the verge of tears. My hands are shaking so much that I can’t hold a pencil still enough to sketch.

  That part makes me even angrier.

  And then I see him for a third time, right outside of the gymnasium. He sees me too, but this time he doesn’t seem in a hurry to get away, even though there’s only five minutes until the bell rings.

  Five minutes doesn’t seem like enough time to say what we need to.

  “Hey,”
he says when he reaches me. He’s wearing a red-and-gold-striped shirt. It reminds me of Harry Potter. I’m still mad about his reaction in government, but if he apologizes, I might be able to forgive him if he likes Harry Potter.

  “Hey,” I reply quietly. I look down at my feet. I’m wearing black Converse sneakers and a Legend of Zelda T-shirt. Maybe he’ll like video games, too. Maybe I didn’t waste my first kiss on a smoker—maybe we have a lot in common that I don’t know yet.

  Right now I feel hopeful.

  “Look, about Friday night,” he says with a laugh. It seems harmless, so I smile back. Maybe this is a joke we’re going to share for a long time. Maybe we can recover from Friday and be friends, or—

  “I would really appreciate it if you didn’t tell anyone what happened,” he says, almost urgently.

  I feel nothing. Everything I thought I felt vanishes, and all my brain leaves me is a stupid look on my face.

  “What?”

  Adam runs a hand through his blond waves and grimaces. “It’s nothing personal. It’s just—you know, my parents—and I had too much to drink—”

  I interrupt him. “What do your parents have to do with anything?”

  His eyes flit across mine, begging me to let him off the hook. He doesn’t want to say it out loud. “You’re not the kind of girl I usually go out with.”

  “What does that mean?” I’m shaking.

  “I don’t usually date Asian girls, that’s all,” he says finally.

  I blink and my eyes go blurry.

  “I don’t have anything against girls like you,” he insists, “but my parents, they wouldn’t understand. This is kind of a small town, you know?”

  WHAT I WANT TO SAY:

  “So you want me to lie about my first kiss because your parents are racist?”

  WHAT I ACTUALLY SAY:

  “You were the one who kissed me.”

  My throat tightens. My face burns. It’s not that I wanted our kiss to mean anything—I’m just not sure I’m comfortable with it being erased. I’m not comfortable being erased.

  Adam shrugs, his jaw clenched. “I was drunk. It didn’t mean anything.”

  I don’t know exactly why I’m so mad. I mean, I know why, but I don’t know which reason makes me the angriest. I don’t know if I’m furious that I wasted my first kiss on a smoking racist, or if I’m enraged that he won’t apologize, or if I’m mad that it meant so little to him.

  Because it didn’t mean a thing to me. It was the worst first kiss in the history of first kisses. But I guess I was going to be okay with that as long as he cared a little bit.

  “So.” He waits, looking at me with a crazed smirk. “Are we cool?”

  I wait a long time before I answer. Not to punish him, but because I can barely breathe. Finally, when my heart slows and I can feel oxygen fill my nose, I show him my teeth.

  “We’re cool.”

  He smiles wider. “Thanks, Kelly.”

  When he walks away, I swallow the lump in my throat that contains the last bit of emotion I had toward Friday night and Adam, and I push it all away.

  • • •

  I draw a boy kissing a girl and the girl shattering into a billion pieces.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  All right, spill,” Emery says, leaning toward me like she’s waiting for me to tell her something important.

  I tap my pencil against the blank page of my sketchbook. Mr. Miller is grading papers at his desk. There’s not enough time left in the year to get anything in the kiln, so those of us who bothered to show up to ceramics at all have been left to our own devices.

  “What do you mean?” I ask quietly, my voice full of shame because I hate what happened on Friday and I hate what Adam said to me today.

  “You were being weird at lunch—weirder than usual,” Emery points out, smiling. “So, what’s up?”

  I don’t want to tell her about Adam, and not because he told me not to. I don’t want to tell her because saying it out loud—forming the actual words of what happened—is humiliating.

  Besides, if I tell her about Adam, I’ll have to explain why I didn’t stop him—why I froze up and couldn’t move.

  I can’t tell her that. I can’t tell anybody that.

  So I tell her about Jamie instead, because it’s a good deflector. Besides, I feel like I’ve waited long enough—if I leave my thoughts in a corner any longer, I might start to forget them. And forgetting about Jamie is the last thing I want to do.

  Emery squeals giddily. “Why didn’t you tell me he was there? I would’ve totally been your wingman. I can’t believe he offered to drive you home. How long is he in town for? I hope you got his number or something.”

  “It wasn’t like that. I think that other girl might have been his girlfriend.”

  “He can’t have a girlfriend. Doesn’t he know you’ve been in love with him for more than a decade?”

  My face breaks into a smile, and I bury my head into my folded arms. The wooden table still smells like clay. “You’re going to make me more nervous than I already am.” I lift my head back up so my voice isn’t so muffled. “It’s been years. He doesn’t see me like that. Not anymore.”

  Emery frowns. “Honestly, you don’t understand how this works. People don’t insist on driving random people around for no reason.”

  I pin my eyes to the blank page. “I would. I mean, if someone needed a ride home, you know? What are you supposed to say?”

  “You say, ‘No. Go call a taxi like a normal person because I don’t know you.’ Some variation of that.” She shrugs.

  “Saying those words would cause me actual, physical pain.”

  “You need to work on that.”

  “I know.” I sigh.

  Emery nods. “I bet he’ll try to get in touch with you. You’ll see.”

  I twist my face. “I don’t know. I think you’re reading too much into it. He was just being nice.”

  “Why do you find it so hard to believe that guys might find you attractive?” she asks seriously. “You are, Kiko. You’re exotic-looking. People love that.”

  The word makes me wince. Exotic. Like Princess Jasmine. It’s how Adam sees me. It’s probably how everyone sees me. Like I don’t belong.

  “I don’t want someone to like me because I’m ‘exotic,’ ” I say. “It makes it sound like I’m an acquired taste, or something someone tries once in a while.”

  “It doesn’t mean anything bad. It just means you’re different,” she says.

  “Exactly,” I say.

  She narrows her hazel eyes. “Are you trying to tell me you’d rather be mashed potatoes than crème brûlée?”

  “I’m saying I don’t want to be the thing that people like once in a while, or because they think it’s unique or exotic.” I don’t want to be kissed by someone who is ashamed about it later because I don’t have blue eyes and blond hair and I might disappoint their parents.

  I hesitate, pinching my fingers against my leg nervously. I know it’s Emery—the last person in the world who would probably be mad at me—but I still worry I might’ve upset her. Confidence is a foreign concept to me, and saying how I feel, out loud, is horribly unnatural. It sounds like I’m yelling my feelings.

  I don’t want her to think I’m yelling at her, and even if it is completely illogical, I don’t want her to be angry with me.

  Emery lifts her brow, eyes softening. “I didn’t know you felt like that. I mean, I’m sorry.” She pauses. “You’re not different to me, you know. You’re just my friend. My beautiful, timeless, mashed-potato-if-you-want-to-be friend.”

  I relax, and a grin settles onto my face. “Thanks, Emery. You complete me.” And it’s true, because I’ve tethered myself to Emery somehow. I feel protected by her, like I can pretend to be mashed potatoes or crème brûlée or whatever I want to be if I see myself through her eyes.

  But the rest of the world doesn’t look through her eyes, or mine. They see me the way Adam does. The way Mom does.
/>   I’m not like them.

  She holds up her fingers in the shape of a heart. “Now I want to hear more about Jamie. Were his eyes as blue as you remembered?” Her voice oozes with theatrics.

  “So blue,” I reply before breaking into a laugh.

  I let Emery distract me with her questions and jokes and ideas for new tattoos. It helps get Adam out of my head, and for just a moment, I almost forget how desperately I need Prism and how badly I want to feel like I’m part of a world that wants me back.

  • • •

  I draw five humans and one skeleton, and it doesn’t matter that the skeleton has all the right bones and joints—he will never be the same as the others because he doesn’t have the right skin.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Taro stands in my doorway. He’s halfway through a strawberry pastry. The smell of toasted sugar makes my mouth water.

  “Mom’s going to strangle you for eating upstairs,” I remark without looking at him. I’m pretending to read over the notes for my English exam, but really I’m trying not to think about my wasted first kiss with stupid Adam.

  “Where were you on Friday?” Taro asks. He sounds like he already knows the answer.

  It pulls my attention away from John Steinbeck. “Why do you care?”

  Taro laughs and chews at the same time. “I know where you were. What were you doing at a party? You don’t even have any friends.”

  “Yes, I do,” I snap.

  He shakes his head slowly. “You don’t. You have creepy clay things.”

  I roll my eyes and turn back to my book.

  “Did you see Jamie?”

  My cheeks burn. “Who told you that?”

  “I have friends—friends who tell me when they see my sister leaving a party with some dude.” Taro shrugs like I should’ve expected this. “So are you still in love with him?” He’s laughing like he’s ten years old and trying to get my attention.

  “Why are you bothering me? You literally never talk to me. What does it matter who I hang out with?”