Where the Stars Still Shine

by Trish Doller

  “Can I have some of that?” Even though I can’t think of anyplace I’d rather be than right here with Alex Kosta, I’m angry. Eating some of his moo shu chicken feels as if it’s a perfect Fuck you, Mom.

  “Sure.” His eyebrows pull together as he looks at me. My eyes hurt and I feel as if I’m going to cry. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, I just—I need to use the bathroom.”

  I sit on the closed toilet lid and try to shove my mom out of my head, but it’s hard when it feels as if she’s out there somewhere watching me, judging me. And my head is a jumbled mess because I want to be with her again. I do. But living with Greg is better than I thought it would be. I have a real bed—even if it’s in a trailer—and home-cooked meals, and little boys who touch me with sticky fingers and call me Peach. I enjoy having a job, even though I’m still not sure if I enjoy the job I have. All of it makes me feel as if I’m being disloyal to Mom. As if I don’t care. And that’s not true at all.

  “Hey, Callie.” Alex’s voice is on the other side of the thin wooden door. “I forgot to tell you that to flush you need to pump the red handle first.”

  “Okay, thanks.” I blow out a breath and look at myself in the dirty mirror on the wall. The eyeliner Kat applied is smudgy, so I run my knuckle beneath my lower lashes to clean it up a little before opening the door.

  I can see the concern in his eyes, but I ignore it as I spoon some of his moo shu chicken onto a pancake and pretend I’m totally fine. “So why does Kat hate you?”

  “She, um—she had a crush on me for a long time,” he says. “Even back when we were kids. I knew about it, but she’s too young for me.”

  “I’m the same age as Kat.”

  “That’s different,” he says, but doesn’t elaborate on what the difference is. “A couple of years ago, she asked me to take her to homecoming and I turned her down. I told her I’ve always considered her like my little sister.”

  I wince.

  “Yeah.” He scrunches up one side of his face. “Didn’t go so well.”

  “I can see that,” I say. “She wouldn’t talk to me after she saw me share my lunch with you the other day. I don’t really get that. I mean, if she’s happy with Nick, why does she care what you do?”

  Alex shrugs. “She doesn’t want me anymore, but she’s still mad that I didn’t want her. Best I can tell, it’s a girl thing.”

  “I have a feeling I’m not very good at being a girl.”

  He leans over and his scruffy face tickles my neck, making me squirm. His voice is low as he says, “You—are exceptionally good at being a girl.”

  We share all the food. Alex eats half of my egg roll, and I find room for a moo shu pancake filled with chicken and plum sauce, rolled into a little Chinese burrito. And after the empties are stowed in the trash, I settle against him again to finish watching the movie. Except I have a hard time paying attention when his thumb is wandering across my collarbone and his lips keep touching my hair. At least I think they do. It feels that way. When I lift my face to look at him, he kisses me and the movie fades to background noise.

  Alex works open the buttons on my shirt, kissing me between each one. When it’s on the floor, he slides my tank top over my head. He tugs off his own T-shirt and sends it to the growing pile of clothes, then pushes me backward until I’m lying on the berth. My jeans and underwear come off together and I lift my hips so he can slide them down. He kneels down on the cabin floor and strokes his thumbs along my thighs, easing them apart. His lips brush against the inside of my knee.

  “What—” The words clog my throat and my heart ricochets around my chest like a drugstore Super Ball. “What are you doing?”

  “I’m not going to hurt you, Callie.” His jaw grazes my skin and the stubble from four days of not shaving raises goose bumps across my entire body. His grin says he’s pleased with himself, but the muscles in my thighs are stone as I await the words that Frank always said. That it will feel good. That I’ll like it. Except Alex says his own words. “If you tell me to stop, I will stop.”

  He touches me with his fingers. So gentle. As if I’m something so fine. I’m scared and shaking so hard and he keeps asking me if I want him to stop, but I don’t want him to stop. Then he touches me with his mouth and I melt.

  When his body finally moves up over mine, my cheeks are damp with tears because I never believed it could feel good or that I would like it. Right now, in this moment, the absence of shame is shaped like Alex Kosta and I don’t want to let go of this feeling. Of him. Ever.

  “All good?” he asks quietly, later, when he’s cleaned up and we’re half-dressed. The TV has reverted to the movie menu, prompting us to watch the movie again.

  I nod against his chest, and this time when I feel his lips against my hair, I know for sure. “All good.”

  I dream about Alex.

  He comes into my room and I’m wearing a Hello Kitty nightgown. I’m seventeen—not a little girl—so it barely covers me, the bottom ruffle falling just below my hips. He lifts the hem, but I’m not afraid because it’s Alex, who whispers that he’s not going to hurt me. Except when he touches me he turns into Frank, who laughs his phlegmy smoker’s laugh and tells me he always knew I liked it. That no one will ever want me because I’ll always be his special girl.

  I break free from the circle of Frank’s arms and stumble out of bed. I snatch up my shirt from the floor and pull it on, holding it closed with my fist, covering myself as I look for my jeans. “Where are my pants?”

  “Callie.” Someone is saying my name. It’s not Frank’s voice, but I ignore it anyway. I have to get out of here. Away from him.

  “I need to find my pants.” The words are soaked with tears and desperation.

  “Callie.” Reality snaps into focus as Alex grabs my shoulders. “What the hell is going on?”

  I blink once. Twice. My heart rate is crazy fast and I touch his face to make sure he’s real. “It was only a nightmare.”

  “Only?” He brushes his fingers along my cheek and they come away wet. “You were crying in your sleep.”

  “It was pretty terrible.” I dry my eyes on the collar of my shirt.

  “Do you, um—do you want to talk about it?”

  “No.” My skin feels as if ants are marching beneath the surface. I don’t want to think about the dream, let alone share it. Not even with him. Especially not him.

  “You probably think I’m the weirdest girl you’ve ever met.”

  “I think …” He rests his chin on top of my head and there’s a kind of security in the hollow of his neck. “… that we all have stories we don’t tell. If you want to share it, you will. Or, you won’t.”

  “Thanks,” I say. “What time is it?”

  “Not sure. Three, maybe?”

  “Three? Are you sure? Shit. I’m so dead.” I wriggle into my jeans and stuff my feet into my sandals. My cell phone has dozens of voice mails and text messages from Greg, Kat, and even Connor. This is so bad. “Shit.”

  Alex dresses quickly and grabs the keys to his truck. “I’ll drive you.”

  “Drop me around the corner?”

  “All things considered …”

  “Yeah.”

  Under any circumstances the ride to the house would be short, but tonight it feels even shorter. Alex pulls alongside the curb around the corner and looks at me. “I feel like a dick for making you deal with Greg by yourself.”

  “You’re not.” I lean over and kiss him quick. Because if I linger, I will have even more reason not to want to get out of the truck. “And I’ll be fine.”

  “Here.” Alex slips something into my hand, and it isn’t until I’m away from the truck that I look down and find a plastic-wrapped fortune cookie in my hand. I’m tempted to open it right now, because what I need most is good fortune, but there’s no time.

  I round the corner, and when I reach the house all the lights are blazing and Greg is sitting on the front-porch steps. He springs forward when I come through th
e gate and I brace myself for an explosion. Instead, his arms wrap around me.

  “You scared the hell out of me tonight.” His hug is both fierce and gentle, the same as the tone of his voice as he speaks. “And I’m so angry that I don’t trust myself to have a rational conversation. Just—thank God you’re okay.”

  “I’m sor—”

  “Theo knows not to expect you tomorrow. We’ll talk then.” He cuts me off and lets me go at the same time, and I kind of wish he hadn’t. “Right now I think you should go to your room and stay there.”

  Disappointment shimmers off him like a hot road on a summer day and I feel like picking a fight with him so he’ll be angry instead of disappointed in me.

  “It’s not a room,” I retort. “It’s a trailer in your backyard.”

  But as I circle around the side of the house to the Airstream—that I really love, regardless of what I say—I don’t feel any better for having said it.

  Chapter 13

  My cell phone vibrates me awake five hours later, and I have to dig through the blankets to find it. The little screen says it’s Kat calling, and I don’t want to answer. I’d rather turtle my head under the covers and hide from reality a bit longer, but she will be relentless. “Hello?”

  “Oh my God, Callie.” Her voice blasts through the receiver. “I have been going out of my mind. Where were you?”

  I scrub the heel of my hand against my eye, dislodging the crust, as I think about what I’m going to say. I can’t tell her about Alex. Not only because I’m afraid of her reaction, but because we reached a different place last night. It’s new and it’s mine, and I’m not ready to share it with anyone. “I just wandered.”

  “For that long?”

  “I’ve been homeless almost my whole life, Kat. A few hours is not a long time.”

  The line is quiet as she considers the reality of my past, and in the background I can hear her mom telling her she needs to get moving.

  “You could have told me about Connor,” she says.

  “I wanted to, but you were so excited about it,” I say. “And he’s nice, so I really wanted to like him, but I don’t. At least not in a way that counts.”

  “Callie.” She sighs and I feel as if I’ve let her down in the same way I let Connor down. “You don’t have to date someone because I say so. You can tell me the truth, you know. That’s what friends do.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Listen,” she says. “My mom is nagging me to get in the shower, so we’ll talk more at work. Want me to pick you up?”

  “I’m not going to the shop today.” Something crackles at my toes. I reach down and find the fortune cookie, shattered within the plastic. “Greg hasn’t yelled at me yet.”

  Kat winces. “That could get ugly. He was crazy worried last night.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Let me know how it goes,” she says. “Love you.”

  She disconnects before I can say good-bye. I tear open the cookie wrapper, fishing out the fortune. My lucky numbers are 6-13-25-32-48, and printed on the front it says: You have the power to write your own fortune.

  Thanks for nothing, fortune cookie.

  I fall backward on my bed, but I’m only there a couple of minutes before I hear Greg calling me through the screen and knocking on the door. “Good morning, Callie.” He doesn’t sound angry, and it’s disconcerting. “Time for breakfast.”

  I grab a pair of shorts and my old Girl Scouts T-shirt and duck into the bathroom, wondering when the other shoe is going to drop. When I come out, Greg is holding the candle with Mom’s cigarette butt. Shit. I forgot to throw it away.

  “You smoke?” he asks.

  “Um—no,” I stammer. “I mean, once in a great while when I’m stressed. Hardly ever. Almost never, really.”

  “I don’t know if you’re telling me the truth or not,” he says, as I follow him out of the trailer and across the lawn. “But if you’re smoking, you need to stop. Not only because I don’t want it around the boys, but because it’s so bad for you.”

  “Okay. I mean, I’m sorry.”

  “So this is how our day is going to go,” he says. “First, breakfast with Phoebe and the boys, then you and I are going to run an errand, and after that, you’ll be doing some yard work for your grandma. Weeding, mulching, mowing—”

  “Is slave labor part of my punishment?”

  He laughs. “Slave labor is part of belonging to a family.”

  Which leaves me wondering what, exactly, my punishment will be.

  Phoebe is scrambling eggs as we come into the kitchen. Tucker and Joe are sitting on the floor, playing with a little farm set of wooden animals. When he sees me, Joe extends a sheep toward me. “Play, Peach.”

  “There’s time,” Greg says, going to help Phoebe with breakfast.

  I sit cross-legged on the floor, and Joe wriggles his way into my lap and tilts his head so he’s looking at me upside down. He smells like baby shampoo, and I get the urge to bury my nose in his hair and just inhale that innocence. “Sheep.”

  “Baa,” I say.

  He laughs, grabs a cow from the set, and resumes the upside-down position. “Cow,” he says, and I know what’s expected of me.

  “Moo.”

  We do this with each animal—duck, horse, pig, goat, chicken—until I have a lap filled with wooden livestock and Tucker whines that we’re not sharing. Joe gives me a sly smile, as if this was his plan all along, and I give him a secret squeeze of solidarity. Except when I look up, Greg is watching and smiling, so I guess it wasn’t so secret.

  “You can play more after we eat,” Phoebe tells Tucker. “Breakfast is ready.”

  Tucker scrambles to his feet and I slide Joe from my lap to stand. He raises his arms, his little fingers making grab hands at me. “Up.”

  I deposit Joe in his high chair and sit beside him as Phoebe and Greg bring breakfast to the table. Breakfast is pleasant, but I’m on edge. The specter of last night hovers and my stomach twists itself into a knot that makes eating homemade scrambled eggs and bacon not nearly as satisfying as it should be, and I wonder if this isn’t punishment in itself.

  After breakfast, Greg and I ride our bikes across Tarpon Bayou to a waterfront construction site on Chesapeake Drive. Sitting on the lot is a faded blue house on stilts with a set of wooden stairs leading up to the front porch. The windows and doors are missing and there is new plywood jutting out from open spaces in the roof where dormers used to be.

  “What is this place?” I ask as I follow him up the stairs.

  “This is one of my projects.” We walk through the space where the front door should be, into a scaffolding of studs and half-hung walls. “The outside has those great old Florida beach-house bones, but the inside was really cut up and impractical. It’s kind of hard to picture right now, but there will be two bedrooms right up here in front, and back there”—he points to a big space with huge window openings overlooking the bayou—“will be a combined living room, dining room, and kitchen. And beyond that, another porch.”

  I don’t know anything about architecture, but the preexisting house is pretty big. Not mansion-size the way they are out at Pointe Alexis, but a lot bigger than Greg’s cramped cottage.

  “Let’s go upstairs,” he says.

  The stairs are built of plywood and there is no handrail yet. Our footsteps echo as we climb to the second floor.

  “This is my favorite part because I love the original wood and the slanted ceiling,” Greg says. “We’re blowing out the front dormer window to create an office space, but this—” He leads me through the two-by-four framework of a new wall. “This will be your room.”

  His words stop me in my tracks. “My room?”

  He pulls a folded set of blueprints from his bag. “Phoebe and I bought this house two years ago, at the same time we bought the cottage, and I’ve spent the better part of last year altering the existing design to something a little more updated.”

  I kneel down and unfold th
e drawing. Greg squats beside me.

  “See this part here?” He touches some lines on the paper. “I added it last week—just for you.” He walks over to one of the walls and spreads his arms wide. “Right here I’ll be building a reading nook with bookcases all the way around it so you can sit in here and read. And out there, where the dormer window used to be, will be your own personal deck.”

  Greg goes blurry as my eyes fill with tears, and I feel both happy and sad at the same time because I want to deserve this, but I don’t feel as if I do. Not after everything I’ve done. He comes over to me and takes me gently by the shoulders. “You have always been a part of my family, Callie. Always a part of my plans.”

  “I didn’t mean what I said about the Airstream,” I say. “I like it a lot.”

  He smiles. “I know.”

  “But this is …” I close my eyes and imagine a wall filled with books.

  “C’mon.” He walks between wall studs out onto the beginnings of the deck and sits, his legs dangling over the edge into the empty air below. I join him.

  “Here’s the thing,” Greg says. “I am so completely out of my depth when it comes to you that I don’t know what to do about last night. Tucker and Joe are easy because they’re little. Whenever Tuck figures out a way around one of our parental roadblocks, Phoebe and I are still smart enough to think up a new one. But you—” He shrugs. “I remember being a teenager, so having to parent one scares the hell out of me. Especially one who has done a pretty good job of taking care of herself.”

  I shade my eyes and look out at the bayou. It hardly seems possible that this view could be mine. That this room will be mine. “I didn’t mean to stay out that late.”

  “It’s not only the staying out too late, Cal,” Greg says. “You left with Connor Madsen and came home hours later alone, without a single call to anyone to let us know where you were. How do you expect me to feel about that?”

  “It’s just—this is new for me, too,” I say. “Mom always worked nights, so I’ve never had to answer to anyone. I wasn’t purposely ignoring your rules. I just lost track of time.”