Everything We Lost

by Valerie Geary

  He’d had friends once, and it had been nice. But then his dad left. And then he got sick and had to leave school for a while. And somewhere in that span of time his friends turned into strangers who wanted nothing to do with him, who seemed to be on another plane of existence entirely. Or maybe it was Nolan who changed, Nolan who floated untethered in another universe. Either way, he felt out of place among these people, these once friends. Their concerns—celebrity gossip, fashion trends, who did what to whom at such and such a party—all of it so trivial and fleeting.

  “It’s okay,” Celeste whispered into his ear. “I won’t leave your side.”

  He scanned the scattered groups of people, looking for someone they might be able to talk to, someone who wasn’t a complete idiot. Like Kevin, his lab partner in chemistry who had memorized the periodic table in sixth grade because he was bored, or Jenny, the girl he sat next to in English who read philosophy books under her desk when the teacher was lecturing. He doubted either of them were invited.

  His eyes skipped over a trio of girls standing off to one side of the fire pit, then skipped back. He blinked, hoping it was a trick of light and he wasn’t really seeing Lucy standing with a beer in one hand, her once-brown hair now bleached white-blond with the ends dyed bright pink, her twiggy frame somehow boasting curves, squeezed into a too-tight, sparkling blue tube top he’d never seen before. He took a step closer. She laughed at something one of the other girls said and gulped from the beer can.

  “What is it?” Celeste asked.

  “Lucy’s here.” He’d told Celeste about his sister, but had never formally introduced her.

  “Where?”

  He pointed. “The one in the middle.”

  When Celeste spotted her, she said, “I’m sure she’s fine. She’s with her friends.”

  Natasha and Megan were not Lucy’s friends. The girls Lucy hung out with were all her age, quiet and shy, and one of them had asthma, and another was always talking about spiders. Lucy was supposed to be with them tonight. That’s what she’d told Sandra earlier that afternoon, that she was going to a sleepover at one of the girls’ houses, and they were going to rent Hocus Pocus and carve pumpkins. But now that Nolan thought about it, he hadn’t seen Lucy with any of those girls in a while, not since school started at least.

  “Let’s go find Patrick.” Celeste tugged Nolan’s hand, but he didn’t follow her lead.

  Lucy was better than this, than all these clones who talked the same and dressed the same and acted the same. He marched over to her, dragging Celeste with him. Lucy made a face when she saw them coming and exchanged eye rolls with the other girls.

  “Go back to your mother ship, Space Case,” Natasha said. “No one wants you here.”

  Nolan ignored her and gave his full attention to Lucy. Firelight flickered over her bare and goose-bumped shoulders and arms.

  “You’re going to catch a cold.” He removed his windbreaker and held it out to her.

  When she didn’t reach for it, he tried to swing the jacket over her shoulders. She pushed him away, sloshing beer on the ground in the process.

  “Go ’way, Nolan.” Her words sloppy and drunk.

  “How much have you had?” He used the same calm, but authoritative tone that he used with their mother whenever she started to slur her words and sway. It worked on Sandra every time. A look of shame would creep into her eyes and she would set down whatever bottle of wine she was working on and make herself a cup of tea instead. She would apologize, and kiss Nolan’s forehead, and thank him for looking out for her. I’d be a mess without you, she’d say.

  But Lucy took it as a challenge.

  “I’m just getting started.” She lifted the can to her mouth and chugged.

  Nolan snatched it away from her.

  “Hey!” Lucy lunged, but he held the can over his head, out of her reach.

  It was almost empty. Six other empty cans littered the sand around the girls’ feet. A cooler rested nearby, the lid lifting and shutting in a steady rhythm, hands reaching, grabbing cans, snapping them open with a hiss.

  “I’m taking you home.” Nolan poured the rest of Lucy’s beer out in the sand.

  “I’m not going anywhere with you.” She took a step back, stumbling a little.

  “You’re drunk,” he said, reaching for her.

  Natasha and Megan leaned into each other, giggling. One of them belched and the laughter got louder.

  “God’s sake, Nolan,” Lucy whisper-hissed. “Can’t you try and be normal for once? Just be cool, okay? I don’t need you looking after me. I can take care of myself.”

  “Clearly.” He glared at the older girls. “They’re drunk too. Who’s driving?”

  Lucy gave him a pleading look, but he remained unmoved. Being embarrassed by your older brother was better than crashing into a pole and dying on the side of the road somewhere.

  For a second, he thought he’d won. Lucy’s false toughness was cracking. She would surrender and let him drive her home. Then her attention was drawn to something over his shoulder, and she tensed up again, then began to fuss, tugging on her shirt, running her fingers through her hair, dabbing at the corners of her pink and glittery mouth.

  “Starlight, you made it!”

  Nolan flinched at the loudness of Patrick’s voice, the way it echoed off the rocky outcrop. He emerged uninvited and suddenly from the shadows, wrapped his arm around Celeste’s shoulders, pressed his mouth close to her ear, and said something no one else could hear. Celeste gave Nolan a helpless look and tried to shrug him off, but Patrick hooked his arm tighter, pulling her closer to him. He was clearly drunk, swaying, struggling to stay in one place, and didn’t seem to notice Lucy and the other girls or even Nolan standing close by, watching as he slurred something about a kiss, just one little, itty-bitty, teensy-weensy kiss. He pushed his lips toward Celeste, who reared away from him, telling him to knock it off. Even then, he wouldn’t let her go. Nolan had to grab hold of his arm and physically pull him off.

  “What the hell, Spaceman?” He shoved Nolan back. “You lost? You put the wrong coordinates into your spaceship or something?”

  He laughed at his own joke and then lunged for Celeste again, trying to swing his arm back around her shoulders. He missed and sloshed beer down the front of her shirt.

  “Shit.” Patrick laughed and slurped at a trickle running down his wrist. “Sorry, babe. Let me get that for you.” He reached for her chest.

  “It’s fine.” She pushed him away. “I’ve got it.” She moved closer to Nolan and brushed at the damp stains spreading across her shirt.

  “It was an accident.” Patrick’s gaze narrowed on Nolan a moment before returning to Celeste. He gave her a sloppy grin and puppy dog eyes. “Don’t hold it against me, unless the ‘it’ is your body.” He slid up close to her again.

  It was the cheesiest line Nolan had ever heard and he wondered how that kind of stupidity worked on other girls. Celeste certainly wasn’t impressed. She pressed close to Nolan’s side and slipped her hand into his.

  “Maybe you should slow down.” Nolan gestured to the beer in Patrick’s hand. “You’re acting like an idiot.”

  “Yeah, well, maybe you should catch up, Spaceman, because you’re acting like a prick.” He gulped down the rest of his beer and tossed the can away, then stumbled toward a nearby cooler, returning with two unopened cans, one of which he shoved at Nolan like he was offering it to him. Before Nolan had a chance to respond, Patrick yanked the beer away.

  “Sorry, Spaceman. You’re going to have to get your own. Or wait . . . do aliens even drink beer? Or doesn’t it make them explode? I read that somewhere, I think. No, never mind, I’m thinking of seagulls and Alka-Seltzer. Yeah, that’s it, right? Oh shit. Who fucking cares?” He cracked open one of the cans and drank deeply, then held the second, unopened can out to Celeste. “Come on, let’s get out of here before we catch some kind of space disease. Little green man mumps or some shit.”

  “I’m here w
ith Nolan.” Her grip on his arm tightened.

  Patrick stared at her, confused. Some dark emotion passed across his face and then he shrugged. “Whatever. Your loss.” He gulped down one beer and then the other, then crushed both cans and dropped them into the sand at Nolan’s feet. To Celeste he said, “When you get tired of hanging out with this loser, you know where to find me.”

  He stumbled away from them to the other side of the fire where Grant and Adam sat on coolers, taking shots from a large glass bottle.

  “You were right,” Celeste said. “This party blows. Let’s get out of here.”

  Nolan turned to where Lucy had been standing earlier, because if they were leaving, he was taking Lucy with them, but she and the other girls had slipped away sometime during his confrontation with Patrick. He spun around, scanning the cove, thought he saw three girls moving in the darkness toward the bluff, and called out Lucy’s name. No answer.

  “They’re probably halfway home by now,” Celeste said, trying to pull him back to where the pickup was parked.

  But he couldn’t leave without knowing for sure. He moved toward the outcrop, scanning the faces of everyone he passed, but none of them were Lucy. Celeste stuck close to him. When they reached the base of the cliff, they discovered a narrow path zigzagging up the face of the plateau. They climbed in silence to the top.

  “It doesn’t look like anyone’s up here.” Celeste peered over the edge of the cliff at the bonfire.

  Nolan left her and walked across the plateau to the opposite side where Owens Valley unfolded to the south, a quilt made of black and orange squares. Bishop and Big Pine sparkled neon in the distance. The mountains to the east were dark and gentle slopes, like a giant woman sleeping on her side. He couldn’t tell where the Inyos ended and the White Mountains began. To the west, the jagged crags of the Sierras, like a row of sharp teeth gnashing the stars. Another narrow path wound down this side of the bluff, and Nolan followed it with his eyes, looking for signs that Lucy and her friends had come this way. They must have. They weren’t at the party anymore, nor anywhere on top of this plateau. He scanned the Tablelands, as far as he could see, but there was no movement in the darkness, no sister-shaped silhouettes against the scrub.

  Celeste came up behind him and slipped her hand into his again. “She’ll be okay.”

  “You don’t know that.”

  She stared up at him, moonlight pooling silver in her copper eyes, and Nolan felt himself relaxing, falling into her gaze. Her lips didn’t move, but a voice that wasn’t his own whispered through his mind, Nothing bad will happen to her. And he believed it.

  “It’s pretty up here. Quiet too.” Celeste led him to a place in the middle where the ground was soft and free of stones and pokey shrubs. They sat down, shoulders touching. Voices and laughter from the party barely reached them up here; they might have been ten thousand feet in the air, sitting on a starry throne.

  “You shouldn’t let Patrick talk to you the way he did down there,” Celeste said, cradling Nolan’s hand in her lap. “All that ‘Spaceman,’ ‘loser’ bullshit? Does he always say stuff like that?”

  “Sometimes, yeah,” Nolan said. “But not always, I mean, he can be nice. He can . . .” He trailed off, not entirely sure why he was trying to defend Patrick’s behavior, except that at one point, not so long ago, they had been best friends.

  Not so long ago, Patrick had been shy and funny and his feet had been too big for his body and he was always tripping, but ended up making a joke out of it, stumbling around like Charlie Chaplin and purposely bumping into walls to get a laugh out of Nolan. The Patrick before he grew into his feet and found out how fast he could run, the Patrick before the girls and the booze and the need to look cool, that old Patrick bought Nolan comic books with his allowance and set aside all his green M&Ms because he knew Nolan liked them best. That old Patrick had drawn passable monsters and villains to fight Nolan’s superheroes; you couldn’t have one without the other. He had stared up at the sky, too, the two of them lying awake on sleeping bags in the backyard, counting distant points of light and making up stories about the man on the moon, arguing until dawn about whether or not warp drives and transporters would ever be invented, and which superhero had the best sidekick, and what really happened to a person after he died. Nolan thought there was probably some of the old Patrick left over, hiding somewhere inside the new Patrick, but that he’d been pushed so far down, buried under all the rest, it would be nearly impossible to draw him out again.

  “Well, I think he’s a jerk,” Celeste said. “And the next time he talks to you like that, you should . . . I don’t know, you should do something.”

  He laughed. “What, like punch him in the face?”

  “Yeah.” She nodded vigorously. “Yeah, and if you don’t do it, then I will.”

  He liked that she wanted to stand up for him, but he was supposed to be taking care of her, not the other way around. He wrapped his arms around her waist and gently laid her back on the ground. She touched his cheek with her fingertips.

  “It’s just, he’s wrong, you know. About you.” Her eyes flashed. “You believe in something big, something incredible. That doesn’t make you a loser. If anything, it makes you interesting. More interesting than small-minded idiots like Patrick.”

  They hadn’t talked much about Nolan’s belief in UFOs and extraterrestrial contact, but she lived with Gabriella, and she knew about the Encounters group, and they had spent enough time stargazing together and contemplating life’s bigger questions that he didn’t have to come right out and say it. She knew and she was still here, bringing her lips to his, her tongue slipping into his mouth.

  She let out a soft moan as his hands slipped under her shirt, as he ran his fingers across her impossibly smooth, too-perfect skin. She tasted tropical, familiar and yet new somehow, and he wanted this to last, he wanted her hands to continue their exploratory trek down his abdomen to the button of his jeans and lower still. He wanted to feel her arch against him, breathe and sigh his name, but he wasn’t sure what the rules were for this kind of thing, if there were any to begin with. He worried about diseases, about toxic skin, or a virus that his human immune system would be unable to handle. Then again, they’d already been in close contact, skin to skin, lip to lip, tongue to tongue; they’d shared spit and nothing terrible had happened. But there were too many factors, too many unknowns, and they should talk about it first, he should make sure this was what she wanted, and what he wanted too, that they knew exactly what this next step would mean for their future, and for the future of humanity.

  He pulled back from her slightly so he could look into her eyes. She smiled at him expectantly, her breath, her pulse, fluttering her throat. Then she threaded her fingers through his hair and stretched to kiss him again.

  “Celeste, wait.”

  She sank back onto the ground, pouting a little.

  “There’s something I need to ask you.”

  But before he could get the words out, a panicked shout reached them from the valley below. “Cops!”

  Nolan squinted through the darkness toward the path they’d come up, but there wasn’t much to see. Shrubs in the dark, a cliff dropping off into nothing. He was going to stay, hide up here until the chaos died down, but Celeste pushed him away, rolling out from under him and leaping to her feet. She said nothing as she bolted, running to the edge of the bluff. Nolan scrambled to his feet and ran after her. A commotion, shouting and a confusion of voices, swelled up from the bonfire. Below them, groups splintered. People fled the light for the shadows. A few kicked sand over the fire and poured out their beers, trying to extinguish the flames. Then they, too, took off running.

  Celeste was a gray wraith, light and swift, bounding down the zigzag path and leaping over rocks, defying gravity. She didn’t check to see if Nolan was following, and she didn’t wait for him when she reached the bottom. She vanished into the shadows with the others.

  He tried to catch up to her, slamming
down the path, but his shoes came untied and he kept tripping and he was so heavy and clumsy, bound by the rules of physics. Once he fell so hard his ankle popped and pain flared and then as quickly dulled. He could put weight on it and walk, so he knew it wasn’t broken, but it still hurt, and slowed him down. When he made it to the bottom of the bluff, the bonfire was out and everyone who had been at the party was gone. Everyone but Nolan. Engines revved in the distance, speakers thumped, tires puffed and hissed through soft dirt as they made their escape, leaving him behind.

  Alone in the dark, and the moon had fled, too, darting behind a swollen cloud. Nolan set off again at a slow, defeated limp. He didn’t blame Celeste for taking off the way she did, only himself for not having the foresight to double-knot his laces. If she’d hesitated, looked back, waited, if she’d slowed down at all, he would have shouted at her to go.

  Several people in the Encounters group, including Gabriella, had warned him before about the police, how some were good and just doing their job, but how a few were crooked, paid by the government to act as goons and spies, showing up uninvited on a contactee’s doorstep and threatening to arrest them without cause, searching and seizing property without warrants. Just a week ago, in fact, Nolan had read an article about a man who’d been arrested for having child pornography on his computer not twenty-four hours after appearing on the Today Show to talk about his experiences. His wife tried to argue that the whole thing was a setup, the pornography planted by the cops who were under orders from a top-secret government agency, after her husband refused to stay silent about the miraculous things he’d seen. But no one listened. The man was still sitting in jail, awaiting his joke of a trial.