Stardust Valley (Firefly Hollow Book 9)

by T. L. Haddix

  As she lifted the atomizer that held her perfume, Marcy hesitated—a tiny hitch, nothing more. “I have a lot on my mind, sweetheart. That’s all.”

  “Do you miss Daddy? He’ll be home today,” Sophie said, swinging her legs as she touched the pretty handle of her mother’s hairbrush. It was silver and white and swirly colors, all shiny like her mother’s favorite set of pearls. Pearls that Marcy was now fastening around her neck.

  “Yes, he will be.”

  Sophie’s papa was an important man, her mother said. He was an engineer with one of the big oil companies, a job that he liked to remind her mother paid very well. He always said it in a teasing tone, but Sophie wondered if he was really kidding or not. There was something about the way he stared at her mama when he said that…

  After Marcy finished getting her hair and makeup ready, she went to her closet. She stood there in her slip and hose for a long time, Sophie thought, longer than usual, gazing at the pretty dresses and clothes inside.

  “Mama? Can’t you decide?” Sophie wandered over to stand beside her.

  Marcy laid a hand on Sophie’s head, running her fingers through her curls, the golden strands so much like her own. “What do you think I should wear today? Something bright and cheery perhaps?”

  Sophie pursed her lips and stood on one leg as she examined the closet’s contents. She finally pointed at a soft pink dress, one whose skirt flipped out at the hem in a floaty, filmy fabric. “That one.”

  Her mother chuckled as she pulled it off the hanger. “You have good taste, Sophie Sunshine, even for someone so young.” Marcy slid the dress on, then sat on the edge of the bed so Sophie could zip it up for her.

  “I have to take you over to Mrs. Clemente’s for a little bit, sweetie,” she said once they were in the kitchen. “I have an appointment I have to go to.”

  “She’s a nice lady,” Sophie said. “Can we have chicken fingers and peas for supper?”

  She didn’t understand why that question made tears well up in her mother’s eyes. It was just chicken fingers and peas.

  “You can have whatever you want. Now, come on. I have to go, or I’ll be late.” She opened her purse and glanced inside. “I have to put something back in the bedroom first. You wait here.”

  In less than a minute, Marcy was back, and they were on their way out the door to walk to Mrs. Clemente’s trailer next door. The sun was blindingly bright, the air unbearably hot—typical for a West Texas summer day.

  “I appreciate you doing this,” Marcy told Mrs. Clemente when she answered their knock and let them in.

  “Oh, it’s never a problem. This little one and me, we always have a good time. Don’t we, Sophie?”

  Sophie nodded. They liked to watch the fast-paced soap operas from south of the border and make spicy food that didn’t taste anything like what her mother cooked. Not that there was anything wrong with her mother’s cooking. Mrs. Clemente’s was just different.

  The first inkling Sophie had that something was wrong came that evening when her father arrived. The anger on Dale Turner’s face was a horrifyingly scary thing for a six-year-old girl to see, especially since it was directed at her. Or it felt as though it was.

  “Where is she? Where’d she go? Did you know about this?” he asked Mrs. Clemente, slapping a piece of paper into her hands.

  Mrs. Clemente unfolded it, shaking her head as she read. “Oh, no. I had no idea, Dale, I swear to you.” She crossed herself, something Sophie’s mama said she did when she was concerned.

  “What about you, Sophie? Huh?” he asked, kneeling in front of the couch where Sophie was curled into the corner. He softened his voice but not the anger in it. “Did you know your tramp of a mother was leaving me for another man? Leaving us? It isn’t only me she doesn’t want, you know. It’s you too. She doesn’t want either of us.”

  “No! You’re lying!”

  Mrs. Clemente shoved between them. “Dale! Stop it! You’re scaring her.”

  Sophie was sobbing, her tears caused as much from the content of his words as the tone.

  He stalked to the door. “Can’t you do something with her? Calm her down or something?”

  Mrs. Clemente already had Sophie in her arms, rocking her back and forth. “Shhh, my baby, it’s all right. He’s not mad at you. You haven’t done a thing. It’s all right.”

  But it wasn’t. It never was again.

  Everything in Sophie’s life changed that night. She’d never been much of a Daddy’s girl, though she hadn’t been afraid of Dale. She simply hadn’t had much to do with him or vice versa. She’d been Marcy’s little shadow.

  But after Marcy left—something Mrs. Clemente explained to Sophie, once she’d calmed down, as a divorce—the terseness in Dale’s interactions with her scraped against Sophie’s soft heart. He blamed her for Marcy’s leaving, and he as much as said so half a dozen times on occasions when he spoke with his guard down.

  By the time Sophie was nine, the happy girl who’d loved nothing more in the world than spending time with her mama, learning how to be a girly-girl, had morphed into an independent, self-sufficient little adult. Well, as self-sufficient as any nine-year-old could be.

  She cooked simple meals for her father and herself, and she was a decent housekeeper, enjoying the control keeping the trailer they called home tidy gave her. She was a pretty good student as well, doing great in history and English but not so great in science and math.

  Her inability to do well in those subjects, despite desperately wanting to, seemed to further drive a wedge between her and Dale. He seemed to take her difficulties with understanding those areas personally.

  When she came home one late-spring day to find him already at their trailer, she was surprised. “Dad?”

  He didn’t even look up from the box he was packing. “You’re going to Kentucky for a while to stay with your uncle Harold and aunt Renny in Hazard. I got a job in Saudi Arabia, and I can’t take you with me. We leave tomorrow morning to drive up there. I put the boxes for your things on your bed.”

  Sophie stared at him, her backpack slipping from her shoulder to land on the floor with a soft thud. “But… what about school?”

  “I’ll transfer you out in the morning first thing. I’ll probably be gone through the end of the year. They’re doing us a huge favor, you know, by agreeing to let you stay there. Especially given how strained your mother left things with Harold.” He glanced over his shoulder with a casual shrug. “We’ll see how it goes.”

  Sophie normally tried to go along to get along, to not cause discomfort for her father beyond what her simple presence already did. But on this, she bucked. “I don’t want to go to Kentucky. I barely remember Harold and Renny. I can stay with Mrs. Clemente.”

  “No, you can’t. She’s moving to California to be near her son now that he’s got a baby on the way. You’re going to Kentucky tomorrow, and that’s that.”

  “I could live with Mom…” she whispered, feeling tears rise up at the thought of moving in with utter strangers. “Did you call her?”

  She hadn’t seen Marcy since that day three years ago when she’d walked her next door, but Sophie was desperate. Even reaching out to her mother felt like a better alternative than living with strangers.

  Dale put his hands on his hips and stared at her. “No, I didn’t call her. I have sole custody, remember,” he stated firmly. “There’s no need for me to call her. Besides, she has a new baby to take care of. She doesn’t need you getting in the way too. Now go start your packing.”

  Instead, Sophie turned and ran next door to Mrs. Clemente. She was sobbing her heart out in the woman’s arms several minutes later when Dale knocked on the door.

  “I won’t go!” she said, burying her face against Mrs. Clemente. “You can’t make me.”

  “Sophie,
love, he’s your papa. You have to go with him,” the kind older lady told her softly. “He’s only looking out for you.”

  “No, he isn’t. He just wants to get rid of me.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” Dale said impatiently. “She’s being ridiculous. Sophie, you’re acting like a spoiled little brat, and I won’t have it. Straighten yourself up right this instant, and you get home and get your things together. Or I’ll throw what I think should go with you in those boxes, and if you don’t have everything when you get to Kentucky, it’s your own fault.”

  With Mrs. Clemente’s help, Sophie managed to calm down.

  “Come on, sweetie. I’ll go with you and help you pack,” Mrs. Clemente said.

  Sophie cried herself to sleep that night. She didn’t speak to Dale the next morning. Not when they went to sign her out of school. Not when they started the long drive to Kentucky. She didn’t open her mouth to talk to him until they’d made it halfway across Texas and she had to use the bathroom.

  When he actually pulled off the interstate to let her go at a rest stop, she was surprised. She hurried as fast as she could, afraid that if she didn’t, he’d leave her behind.

  The trek took three days. They had to stop in Oklahoma City so Dale could meet with someone from the oil company he worked for and get paperwork that Sophie’s uncle Harold would need—emergency contact information and the like. They spent the night there, then they journeyed on to St. Louis the next day.

  “What do you say we catch a ball game while we’re in town?” Dale surprised her by asking.

  Sophie shrugged. She still wasn’t talking to him much. “Sure.” Anything to put off the inevitable.

  That night, as they sat in the huge stadium and listened to the noise of the crowd, the pops and cracks of the ball hitting wood bats and leather gloves, Sophie was miserable. She was torn between being a wide-eyed kid with her dad at her first major-league ball game and being a scared little girl who was afraid she’d never see home again, that home would cease to exist.

  During the seventh-inning stretch, Dale sat back and sighed. “This is a good opportunity for us, kid. It’s really good pay, the kind of money I couldn’t touch with a ten-foot pole here in the States. And it’s a promotion too for me. A path to the top.”

  “Do you think you’ll be home for Christmas?” Sophie asked, picking at one of her fingernails, which was ragged from being chewed on.

  “I don’t know. It isn’t like we do much for Christmas anyhow. I’m sure Renny does it up nice. You’ll like that.”

  She looked at him, saw the way he wouldn’t meet her eyes, the discomfort in his posture, and she knew then that he wasn’t planning to ever come back for her.

  For the rest of the trip, she struggled to keep her tears back, her fears at bay. She fought to keep from asking him whether Harold and Renny, and their daughter Erica, wanted her or not. She was desperate to know the answer, but she was also afraid of what it would be. So she kept her mouth shut, chewing on her fingernails instead.

  By the time they reached the small, lazy-paced mountain town of Hazard, nestled in the heart of the Appalachian Mountains, she didn’t have a single finger that didn’t look like a rat had gnawed on it.

  “It’s so green here,” she observed as they made their way to Harold and Renny’s house, following the road that ran alongside a slow-moving river.

  Dale laughed. “That it is. Not like West Texas, that’s for damned sure.”

  When they pulled up in front of the modest two-story house set back next to the woods, surrounded by a chain-link fence, a man and woman who seemed vaguely familiar stepped out onto the porch.

  “There they are.” Dale got out, leaving her to get out or not.

  Once she’d gotten up the nerve to open her door, Sophie hung back, unsure of what her welcome would be.

  “Oh, my goodness,” Aunt Renny said, coming down from the porch to meet them. Her soft drawl was both similar to and nothing like the twang of a West-Texas lady. “Sophie Sunshine, look at how tall you’ve gotten!”

  It’d been a long time since anyone had said her full name, and the moniker her parents had saddled her with had never struck Sophie as absurd more than it did in that moment.

  Renny folded Sophie into a hug then gave her cheek a wet kiss. “You’re so much like your mother it’s uncanny,” she said as she rubbed the wet spot with her thumb. Though her smile was bright, the calculation in her eyes gave Sophie pause.

  Uncle Harold, however, appeared to be more genuine in his enthusiastic welcome. “You do look just like Marcy at your age. It’s so good to have you here. Come on in, both of you. Erica’s at the beach with one of her little girlfriends. They’ll be home any minute now. She’s so excited to have you spending some time with us, Sophie, especially since you’re the same age. Are you eager to start back to school?”

  “Yes, sir.” Sophie wasn’t really. She was terrified of the idea of going to school in this new, unexpected place, but she didn’t think starting off on an argumentative foot was the way to go.

  Besides, would telling the truth do any good? She didn’t think so. She didn’t think anything she said or thought or felt mattered anymore. She was at the mercy of all the adults in her life, and that was that.

  She discovered that evening that there was one more person whose mercy she was at, and that person… oh, that person was the one she’d have to watch out for.

  Erica Miller was her mother’s pride and joy, her daddy’s princess, and the queen of her realm. That realm, Sophie came to discover, included anything Erica wanted it to. Any friends, clothes, books, toys, even the teachers at school that Erica chose to be hers. And if Sophie wanted a moment’s peace, she learned quickly to go along with Erica. To let her have her way.

  Until Sophie met Noah Campbell when she was fifteen.

  The sweet, somewhat-shy boy who bumped into her in the library one day, sending her books flying, turned her upside down. He was stunningly handsome, unaware of his own appeal, with hazel-brown eyes, silky dark hair that tended to flop onto his forehead in an almost-curl, and a smile that reached inside Sophie and transformed part of her soul into something light and airy in a way that she hadn’t felt since before her mother left.

  Sophie fought Erica for the right to date Noah, quietly and firmly refusing to yield her ground. And for three brief months during the spring of her sophomore year, he was hers. She was also his, as far as that went. Noah never pressured her to do anything, but all he would have had to do was ask.

  Any lectures her aunt and uncle had delivered about caution and sensibility, any of their concern about the troubles a teenage girl could get into, and Sophie’s common sense itself had all gone straight out the window that day in the library.

  They had a lot of dates, including some intimate times where they learned about each other’s bodies in ways she never could have imagined. They didn’t fully consummate their relationship, but Sophie knew that ultimate commitment was coming.

  She had the feeling prom night, which was only a week away, would be it. And she was ready to give herself to Noah. She wanted to be his. Wanted him to be hers. She loved him and trusted him, and she knew he felt the same way about her.

  Then Noah himself proved exactly how wrong she was with four little words. Four words he’d snarled at his brother, triumph and fury in his gaze as teachers fought to pull the boys apart before they could kill each other in the hall one day between classes.

  “I had her first.”

  Four words that, more than ten years later, Sophie still heard in her sleep. Everything she’d thought she had was a lie. That pain was almost more than she could bear.

  Erica had decided that if she couldn’t have Noah, if she couldn’t budge Sophie on that, she’d take his brother, Eli, instead. Eli was a good guy, a sweet kid, and someone S
ophie had thought of from the get-go as a friend. When she and Noah started dating, he and Eli had called an uneasy truce to the building war developing between them.

  They had even double-dated a time or two—she and Noah, Eli and Erica.

  But that day in the hall, when the brothers took out all their anger and hurt on each other, their relationship wasn’t the only one that was destroyed.

  So was Noah and Sophie’s.

  She’d heard the rumors that morning in French class, and she prayed they were wrong. Whispers about Noah, nasty rumors that Eli’s jock friends teased her with.

  “Is it true?” they’d asked, their voices mockingly scandalized for all their quietness. “He thinks he can talk to the dead?”

  Sophie’d known immediately where the rumors had come from—Erica. Her cousin had been too satisfied with the way things ended, and the rumor mill was one of her favorite weapons.

  But with hindsight, she wondered how Erica had known. Had Eli told her, or had Noah? The idea that Noah would have shared such a secret with Erica was another knife in Sophie’s heart.

  Before she could get to Noah to warn him though, the fight had broken out. And she arrived, Erica by her side, just in time to hear Noah tell his brother, “I had her first, you know. You remember that the next time you fuck her. She might be yours now, but I had her first!”

  Somehow, Sophie’d made it to the girls’ bathroom without falling apart. As she slammed the stall door shut behind her, dropping her books on the floor to scatter, the pain nearly ripped her in half. That afternoon, she skipped her classes, something she’d never done. She couldn’t go back in and face everyone, so she hid in the girls’ locker room in the gym until the time came to board the buses.

  “Where’ve you been?” Erica asked her as she boarded.

  Sophie sent her a stony glare and shoved past her. Thank God it was Friday, and at least she’d have the weekend to recover.