Kiss the Stars (Devon Slaughter Book 1)

by Alice Bell

  One night, I had the thermostat turned up too high, and I tossed and turned.

  (It was winter break. Zadie had gone skiing with her family. Hoar frost covered the trees. I was writing a term paper on Dostoevsky’s Demons.)

  This time, the nightmare started with the sound of an approach.

  Footsteps crunched outside. There was the usual heavy breathing, accompanied by scuffling on the deck.

  A key turned in the lock.

  The door swung open.

  My heart pounded. I had only my fists for weapons. But I stood by the bed, ready. I was going to kill. With my bare hands.

  The intruder found a light switch.

  I squinted in the harsh glare. “What the fuck, Enid?”

  She liked to incite extreme emotion in people. I think she would have enjoyed it if I’d punched a hole in the wall above her head, or if I’d shoved her back out the door, hard enough to make her fall. Both ideas had gone through my mind.

  She dangled a key from a small chain, twirling it. “Did you lose this?”

  It was the key I’d given Zadie. I was rooted to the floor. “That’s Zadie’s,” I said, finally.

  “I guess she lost it,” and Enid tossed the key onto the table. It landed on my laptop.

  My mind spun. Zadie must have misplaced the key, or maybe Enid stole it from her but it didn’t matter. Zadie hadn’t noticed it was missing.

  Wearing no underwear, Enid was naked in the span of seconds.

  I couldn’t stand her. But I was instantly hard. She had the body of a Playboy centerfold, soft and curvy, while Zadie was all long limbs and sharp angles.

  She did things Zadie wouldn’t. She was hungry and dirty and beautiful.

  We lost track of time with the days almost as dark as the nights.

  We drank mineral water and imported beer and went back to bed. We soaped each other in the Jacuzzi and talked about Dostoevsky and put on Smashing Pumpkins and went back to bed.

  I had the nightmare again. When my eyes opened, Enid was sucking me off.

  I figured she would tell Zadie and braced myself for the fall-out. She never did.

  I don’t know why but the whole episode made me more possessive of Zadie, to the point my mother declared our relationship unhealthy.

  We were both headed for the same college back east. At the last minute, Zadie changed her mind. “I can’t,” she said. “I can’t waste four years of my life. I’m going to California.” And that was it. Not a single email, voicemail nor ‘drink and dial’ marred what seemed like a clean break.

  I was surprised to feel nothing. I didn’t even care my mother may have been right about us.

  Enid was the one who brought us together again, though it’s not what she intended.

  Enid had a way of showing up all the time, for years after high school. A few months into my first term at college, we met at a house party. Then we ran into each other in Sun Valley. The summer I interned in the city, she dated my roommate and found her way into my bed.

  Our random hook-ups were becoming more and more frequent. They were starting to interfere with my other relationships. It seemed like whenever I got serious with someone, I’d cross paths with Enid.

  When I was teaching upstate, after I got my PhD, she showed up on my doorstep every weekend. Years were slipping by and she never expressed wanting anything other than sex. I hated myself for not being able to say no to her.

  I mentioned that maybe we were screwing up our lives by screwing so much. She said maybe we were just destined and if we fought against our fate, we could end up clawing our eyes out. Which made me want to claw my eyes out.

  Without warning, without leaving any trace she could follow, not even telling my parents, I cut out of New York and headed for California.

  I’d heard bits and pieces about Zadie. She’d tried acting, she’d signed with an agency and had done a few commercials…she was writing a screen play. I honestly doubt we would have seen each other again, until our fifty year high school reunion, if it wasn’t for Enid.

  Having sex with Enid opened a cavernous hole inside me only Zadie could fill.

  By then, Zadie was living in Venice Beach. I caught up to her at a party. She was in the short pink dress and I saw her all the way across the room with her white blonde hair. Head On by the The Jesus and Mary Chain blared from a stereo.

  Our eyes met. Her surprised smile lit the room and I wondered why we had ever parted.

  * * *

  I toss and turn, looking for a cool spot on the sheets.

  A nightmare has me in its grip. I’m running and the monkeys are screaming and swinging from the branches above me. Red smoke billows and rises into the sky.

  I wake with a gasp and lurch out of bed. My eyes are hot coals, my muscles throb. Sunshine streams through the window.

  Zadie isn’t here.

  The act of dressing in cut-off jeans and a T-shirt is so nauseating; I run to the bathroom to vomit in the toilet. I stand up on shaky legs. When I wipe my mouth, there is blood. It’s coming from my nose. I splash cold water on my face, and hold a towel to my nostrils, until the bleeding stops.

  By now, I’m shivering. This isn’t a hang-over. I want to crawl back into bed but I have to find Zadie.

  I force myself to drink water. It sloshes in my stomach. I hold it down and slip into flip-flops and head out. It’s hard to think straight. Mist hovers on the snaky path. Monkeys throw things at me.

  At the bar, I force down a shot of Nescafe, like it’s medicine. The guy, who is always there in the morning, making scrambled eggs and cutting fruit for people hiking the volcanoes, is an ex-pat from the States. He’s slightly grizzled, forty-ish. “You look rough,” he says.

  I drain my glass and wince. “You know my girlfriend, blonde, tall—”

  He waves his hand. “Yeah, man.”

  “She didn’t come back last night.”

  He grimaces.

  “We were here…with friends,” I say. “I took off early.”

  “Shii-it.”

  I’m afraid I’m going to puke again, so I stagger away, stumbling off the wooden steps and into the courtyard, where I brace myself against the wall.

  He follows me. “Dude, you’re in bad shape. Could be Dengue.”

  Fuck.

  “Or a bad case of amoebas,” he says. “You gotta see a doctor.”

  “I’ve got to find my girlfriend.”

  I tell him about Enid and he takes me to her casa, ready with the key, in case she doesn’t answer, which I appreciate. But Enid comes to the door looking fresh and rested, in a red and yellow sundress. Her hair is wet. I want to strangle her. “Where’s Zadie?” I say.

  “Oh, my God, Devon, baby.” Enid acts so concerned and innocent. “You look like hell,” she smiles.

  I shove her aside and scan the room, go into the bathroom. I know it’s pointless. Zadie isn’t here. I hope to God she’s with one of the guys. Just so long as I find her.

  But she’s nowhere.

  Enid claims she left Zadie with her friends who are already gone, on the ferry back to the mainland. In San Jorge, officials catch up to them. Zadie doesn’t get off the boat. Enid’s friends say she was on the beach when they saw her, last night.

  Enid gets serious, as if just comprehending the reality of the situation. I’m sweating like a whore in church and the policia are starting to look at me with suspicion. I’m grateful when Enid takes charge.

  Hours, or days, blur into one another and I’m losing my shit, burning with fever. Somewhere in the midst of an evening rain shower, Zadie’s dress washes up on shore and I’m the one who finds it.

  I sink to my knees, before passing out and falling into darkness.

  17. Ruby

  DAYLIGHT CREPT under the curtains. Something heavy pressed down on me.

  Devon’s arm.

  Last night was torture. To be so close to him, to feel the warmth of his body, his hands on me, working me into a delirium of shivers, only to have him stop
suddenly, as if I was nothing but a toy to fondle.

  I rolled away, thinking he would wake up. He didn’t. He hugged the pillow instead of me. I studied him in the semi-dark. Like always, my breath caught. He’d been in a bad way last night. I thought I should let him sleep but not for his sake. I was afraid when he woke, he would leave. And I couldn’t bear it.

  He didn’t stir, not even an eyelid.

  I dressed without turning on the light. I shimmied into a black sweater dress, black lace panties, and pink tights. I slipped my watch over my wrist and tip-toed out of the room, closing the door behind me. It made a hushed click.

  Downstairs, I opened the curtains. The sun melted through the clouds.

  In the bathroom, I washed my face and applied a dusting of powder over my freckles. I lined my eyes in black and tried to comb through my tangled hair. I felt tired, almost sore, like I was running a low-grade fever. Devon had probably given me the flu.

  When the phone rang, I raced to answer it. My hand shook when I lifted the receiver. “Hello?” I whispered.

  “Ruby.” It was Henry.

  “Oh. Hi.”

  “What are you doing?” he said.

  “Um…what am I doing?”

  There was a long pause, like it was still my turn to talk. My mind reeled. I didn’t know what to say.

  “Why are you whispering?” he said, eventually.

  “No reason,” I spoke louder, glancing toward the doorway.

  Another long silence followed.

  At last, he said, again, “What are you doing?”

  “Right now?” I said.

  “Or maybe just before you answered the phone.” I could hear his smile.

  I frowned, wondering if he was making of fun of me. I imagined Georgie standing beside him, trying to stifle a giggle. My gaze swept across the room to the bookcase. “I was in the middle of reading Proust,” I said. “Du côté de chez Swann…”

  “Oh, wow. In French?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “I flunked out of French,” he said. “Forget about pronunciation. I couldn’t even ask someone to go to bed with me, which is the first thing everyone learns, right?”

  I thought I heard movement upstairs and held the receiver away from my ear to listen.

  “Ruby?” Henry was saying. “You still there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Listen, you want to get coffee? I could pick you up.”

  “Right now?”

  He made a funny noise, like he was muffling a guffaw and I imagined him snorting with laughter as he relayed our conversation to Georgie. I was glad I’d lied and told him I was reading Proust.

  “Uh—so, coffee?” he said. “Yes, no, maybe?”

  I twisted the phone cord. “I can’t.”

  I felt a stab of regret. Being asked out by Henry Thorne had once been my biggest fantasy. But that was before I caught him and Georgie laughing about me in the teacher’s lounge. And it was before Devon.

  I wondered if fantasies only came true after you didn’t want them anymore.

  * * *

  I made coffee and heated a chocolate croissant. Sitting at the kitchen table, I sipped and ate, while reading exams.

  The girl who left early wrote: “Being a woman, I find it personally insulting and typically male that the narrator believed Annabel Lee had ‘no other thought’ than him. After the first stanza, I knew we were dealing with an unreliable narrator, i.e. psycho.”

  I circled unreliable and wrote, interesting.

  “When I read the part about how he thought the heavenly angels coveted his and Annabel’s love, I wanted to laugh so hard, I was afraid I would end up crying and that scared me a little, like I might get the creeping creepies just from reading the poem. This I experienced all before the whammy of a climax where the narrator claims a ‘wind’ (faaaart!) ‘blew out of a cloud’ and killed his love. Seriously, I heard this clanging music in my head and had the sensation of witnessing a bloody stabbing in someone’s shower. I liked the movie better.”

  I put an exclamation mark in the margin.

  “So. In conclusion, this is truly an infectious read, like an STI. Oh yeah, and to answer your question, duh, the guy was definitely obsessed. That’s putting it kindly. Maybe I’m not the best audience for this poem, since I just broke up with someone who was saving stray pieces of my hair and skin. I could go on but it would be too gross, like the poem. Suffice it to say, love bites.”

  I underlined ‘creeping creepies’ and wrote, Nice Use Of Alliteration. At the bottom of the page, at the end of the essay, I scrawled C+ and drew an arrow to the next page, where I wrote: Full of passion and compelling ideas that prove nothing, not even that you actually do hate love. Do you believe all love is obsessive and therefore, should be hated? If so, you need to tell me that in the intro, prove it and tell me again at the end when I am ready to believe you. An easier essay to write would be simply to prove to me that the narrator of the poem was obsessive. You might get an A. If you want an A+ then you have to make me hate love too. As it stands, I believe love can, and WILL, make the world a better place.

  It took several hours to finish grading the senior essays. My shoulders were tight when I was done. All of the assignments had one thing in common. They were a mess. Apparently, the seminar I’d given on the five paragraph essay had not been inspiring.

  I made more coffee and listened for signs of life from Devon. I envied people who could sleep like the dead.

  My first roommate in college enjoyed sleeping a lot. She treated it like a sport. When she’d turn off the lights at ten p.m., I’d read under the covers with a flashlight, which drove her nuts, (before she passed out cold). “For the love of God,” she’d say, like I was ruining her life. “Why don’t you have an iPad?”

  But I saw flickering shadows and shifting shapes behind computer screens, as if they contained gateways to secret worlds. Computers gave me vertigo, the same as if I was on the roof of a skyscraper and lured by the idea of jumping into thin air.

  I wrote all my papers by hand and went to the library to type them up as fast as I could. I never told my shrink about my phobia because I knew he would force me to confront it.

  Again, I thought of scheduling an appointment with Dr. Ess. I checked my watch. It was nineteen past one. On a Saturday. I’d have to use his answering service.

  The problem was, if I saw Dr. Ess, I couldn’t tell him about Devon. He would say I was in danger of developing an unhealthy obsession. And I didn’t want him to get in my way.

  I gazed out the kitchen window. Drops of moisture clung to my grandmother’s roses. Would Dr. Ess believe me if I told him I’d conjured Devon’s likeness perfectly, down to the shape of his lips?

  I cocked my head, thinking I heard movement above me but it was just the old house shifting. I decided to check on Devon and trailed my hand along the banister as I went up the stairs.

  Hovering outside the bedroom, I listened. When I heard nothing, I opened the door slowly. The floor groaned as I walked across it. Devon didn’t wake.

  Standing by the bed, I stared at him. My heart fluttered. I reached out and touched his cheek. When he didn’t move, I leaned down and pressed my mouth to his. I swooned at the feel of his lips on mine.

  Was he breathing?

  I pulled the covers back to look at his jeans that I’d unbuttoned. I slipped my fingers beneath his waistband and closed my eyes. My face got hot. My eyes snapped open.

  Why didn’t he wake?

  I backed away.

  Outside in the hall, my grandmother’s huge house felt suddenly small, as if the walls were closing in. I wanted to run downstairs and put on a record, something loud to drown out the feeling of terror building inside me.

  Instead, I went to the end of the hall where there was a door I never used. My palms sweated. I wiped them on my dress and lifted the latch.

  Reaching above me, in the dark, I swung my hand, looking for the string to trigger the light. Spider webs stuck
to my fingers. I gasped and found the string and yanked. A bare bulb sputtered on.

  I went up the narrow staircase, as if compelled by an unseen force. I didn’t want to find out. And yet, I kept going, driven by a perverse need to uncover the distant memory that had started to beat against the edges of my mind, like moth wings.

  The attic was large with slanted ceilings, lit by the afternoon light coming through the long windows to the west. Built-in bookcases lined the north and south walls and two diamond shaped windows faced east.

  In the middle of the room my four poster bed was shrouded in a mosquito net, rigged up by me, for the days when I pretended I was in Africa. The fights between my mother and Javier had begun by then, and Africa was as far away as I could imagine.

  And yet, the dust floating in the last rays of sunlight, the lemony smell of old floor polish and the few books left on the shelves, comforted me and reminded me of a time when I had felt safe. The attic had been my refuge. When my grandmother came in from some exotic place, resting up for her next adventure, I’d put on plays for her, changing costumes behind the red Venetian screen.

  But now the attic was a tomb of buried memories and hidden artifacts. My gaze landed on a chest pushed against the wall.

  I had trouble unfastening the buckles. My hands shook. At last, the soft leather straps fell away. When I lifted the lid, I was surprised by the clean aroma of cedar. I’d been expecting the stench of decay.

  I sat on the floor. It was hard to match the heaviness in my heart with the items in the chest.

  On top lay a white wedding dress. I took it out, holding it to my face. It smelled of cedar and Shalimar. It was a simple dress, adorned only with lace at the collar and sleeves.

  I imagined standing at the altar with Devon. Sunlight came through red stained glass windows. He lifted my veil and had to bend down to kiss me.

  I’d only discovered my mother’s wedding dress, after she died. I’d laid it back inside the chest. Now I was gripped by the need to feel its silky smoothness against my skin. I was in a hurry, for some reason. I tore off my scratchy sweater dress and my tights.