Second Star

by Alyssa B. Sheinmel

  I look at Fiona, desperately confused. “I thought you told them—”

  “I did, Wendy, I did.”

  “But then—”

  “Wendy—”

  I shake my head. “You didn’t believe me?”

  “Wendy,” Fiona says, “it makes perfect sense, like I said. We even called that grief counselor and she agreed. You’re so torn up about the loss of your brothers that your brain constructed this, this…”

  She searches for the words. Somewhere in this house, I know, is a pad of paper scrawled with notes they took while talking to the grief counselor.

  Finally, she says, “This alternate reality to protect yourself from what really happened.”

  “I know what really happened,” I say. My head is pounding so hard that I think I could dance in time to its rhythm.

  “You have been taking drugs,” my mother says, thin-lipped. “This is all some kind of psychosis.”

  “Is that what you told them?” I ask, turning back to Fiona. “Just because I was gone for a few weeks?”

  Fiona shakes her head. “It started before you left. At the bonfire, the night we graduated. Even Dax thought you were acting strange—”

  “Well if Dax thought so, it must be true. He knows me so well, after all,” I spit.

  Fiona bites her lip and looks at her feet. I turn to face my mother.

  “Mom, you have to listen to me—”

  She shakes her head. “We’re going home.”

  I open my mouth to protest, to insist, to beg. But my mother looks so helpless, so defeated, so empty, that instead I just nod and follow my parents out the door. I even let Fiona hug me goodbye, when what I really want to do is scream at her, maybe even hit her for not believing me, for betraying me.

  Nana is waiting at the door, but she doesn’t run to me the way she usually does when I come home. Instead, she backs away from me, wary, like she doesn’t recognize me. Like I’m a stranger. I start crying all over again.

  “I know, honey,” my father says, coming up from behind me and putting an arm around my shoulder. “I know.”

  My mother carries my duffel bag in from the car—I don’t even remember bringing it with me from Pete’s house, but I must have—unzips it on the kitchen counter, and begins sifting through it like she’s looking for contraband. It takes me a second to realize that she’s looking for drugs.

  “Mom,” I say, “there’s nothing bad in there. Just clothes and some extra cash.” She won’t even look at me, just keeps going through my bag.

  “Why don’t you go to your room, honey?” my father says finally.

  “Am I being punished?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then why are you sending me to my room?”

  He sighs. “Because that’s what they told us to do. Something about reestablishing authority.”

  I shake my head. I wonder if my parents would even have noticed that I was gone if I hadn’t come back in the state I’m in. If I weren’t aching with withdrawal, I think a tiny part of me would be glad that they’re paying attention. Even though they’re wrong—about me, about my brothers, about Kensington—they seem to have begun to come out of the fog they’ve been living in for the last nine months.

  “Who told you to do that?”

  “The people at the center.”

  “What center?”

  “It’s for people with problems like yours.”

  No one has problems like mine, I think but do not say.

  He continues, “Supposed to be the best in the country. They’ll admit you just as soon as a spot opens up.”

  As soon as a spot opens up.

  He doesn’t offer me any further explanation—will it be days, weeks, months? Will I still be allowed to start college in September? I want to ask, but I can feel my pulse pounding beneath my temples, and I’m pretty sure that if I open my mouth again nothing but sobs will come out.

  I have to beg Nana to follow me into my room, and even once inside, she keeps her distance from me. I can’t say I blame her. I catch a glimpse of my face in the mirror; I don’t look anything like myself. I can’t say exactly what about me has changed; my hair is the same color, my eyes the same shape. My skin is tanner, I suppose. There’s something else, something deeper that’s changed. I still look like me, but off somehow. Like I’ve aged ten years in a few days.

  Or maybe it’s just that I’ve cried so much that my face has been emptied out, dry and salty as a desert.

  22

  I don’t know how much time goes by before the pain sets in. Something beyond the headache and past the tears, an ache from somewhere deep inside my chest that radiates into my joints so that I can’t turn my neck or grip a pencil. I want to cry out, but I don’t want to make Nana more frightened of me than she already is. And it’s not like I want my parents to come running.

  How can it hurt this much? I only used the drug once. No wonder my brothers went back to Jas and asked for more. No wonder Pete couldn’t convince my brothers to stop.

  Suddenly, I’m breathtakingly, teeth-chatteringly cold. This is what people mean when they say their blood runs cold. This is a cold that’s coming from inside of me, as though my very bones are turning to ice. I burrow under my covers, an animal hibernating her way through the cold winter.

  But my sleep is fitful, and when I dream it is always, always of Kensington. I see Belle on the water, flying over a wave as though she has wings—sometimes she does have wings—and soon I can’t remember whether I ever did see her surf or just dreamed I did. She’s so tiny, after all; surely if she’d tried to surf, the ocean would have swallowed her whole. Like they say it did my brothers.

  I dream of—or do I simply remember?—sitting on the handlebars of a bike as it flies down a hill, slipping inside a mansion door. That must have been a dream. I would never have done that in real life.

  I dream about a house with tiles so white they seem to glow in the moonlight, of boys who come back from the beach but don’t track a single grain of sand through the house. I dream of waves that come in perfect sets, with symmetry and grace that would dumbfound the scientists who insist that perfection doesn’t exist in nature. I dream of sand so soft and sunlight so warm, but I wake up shivering in sheets damp with sweat.

  I dream of being held by a tall form with beautiful eyes, whose skin was dry and whose breath was cool as winter, whose voice sounded like rain. I dream that he took flight over the waves on a surfboard, as though the board were just some extension of his feet, a part of his body.

  Or maybe I’m not dreaming. Maybe I’m just tossing and turning all night long. Or maybe it’s day. It’s so hard to tell here, in the glass house that never really gets dark.

  And I dream of a boy named Pete, tall and skinny and covered in freckles. A boy who always looks like he’s laughing because of the tan lines that wink out from the corners of his eyes. A boy into whose hand my own fits perfectly, a boy whose laugh sounded like the call of a crow heralding the morning. A boy who held me against his chest and promised to help me. A boy who led me into the ocean and helped me fly.

  I’m never sure if he’s a memory or a dream. My parents keep telling me it was all a hallucination. When she searched my bag, my mother took my notebook away, the one where I wrote down all my research.

  I search my sheets for sand, but I find none. I don’t know why I expect to find sand in my bed—I haven’t been to the beach in weeks, haven’t even left the house since coming home. But every morning, I wake up disappointed. My mother thinks she’s helping me when she strips the bed and washes the sheets almost every day. Neither of us understands why I cry every time I slip between the freshly laundered sheets, sheets without a trace of the sea left on them, not even a whisper of the ocean; only detergent and a hint of my mother’s perfume.

  “It’s gone,” I whisper.

  “What’s gone, honey?” I look up at her; her eyes are so sad and far away, narrowed with concern.

  I shake my head. “M
aybe it was never there to begin with.”

  “That’s right, honey,” she says, and I try not to think about the wrinkles around her eyes, the way they’ve deepened from so much crying. Just the opposite of the boy’s eyes, the lines around them that make it look like he’s always smiling. Even when I’m yelling at him. Which, apparently, I did, just before I left him.

  Why does missing these people and that place ache like a withdrawal all its own? Every night, my dreams are filled with Pete and even Jas, images so vivid and so powerful that I think they, at least, must be a memory.

  Because if they’re not real, then how do I miss them so much?

  And then suddenly, one morning, the pain is gone. I wake up hungry. My stomach clenches food like a vise, and I think I’ll never be sick again. I practically skip to the shower and wash my hair three times, lather up soap over my skin until it looks like I’m covered in foam.

  Pete told me once that surfers can breathe in the oxygen from the foam that crests on the edge of waves when they’re being pummeled and can’t quite make it to the surface. They call it soup, he said.

  The memory comes like a flash of lightning and disappears just as quickly. I shake my head and wash my hair a fourth time. I’m sick of smelling like my bed, like cold sweats, sour with illness. I want to look and smell like myself again, want Nana to stop eyeing me warily, like I’m some kind of impostor in her best friend’s skin. When I get out of the shower, I start a load of laundry. I turn on my computer and find e-mail after e-mail from Stanford, briefing me on orientation, telling me that my dorm is called Branner Hall and my roommate’s name is Sadie. There’s a list of suggested items to bring, everything from extra towels to flashlights, and I print it. My mother and I can drive to the store later, get everything on this list and then some. I feel like a little kid who’s about to start first grade, eager to fill her backpack with school supplies.

  I spend the next few days normally; driving to the mall with my mother, laughing during visits with Fiona. Once, I ask if Fiona and I can drive down to the beach, and my parents look slightly panicked until Fiona breaks in and says she’d rather not go. She’s been avoiding the sun this summer, she says, even though her tan belies her words. Some aunt of hers was diagnosed with skin cancer, she claims. Instead, we watch movies and my father picks up Chinese.

  My parents seem almost back to normal; my father is going into the office regularly, and my mother gets dressed almost every day. Sadness still hangs over the house, but it feels lighter somehow, less likely to shatter the windows and walls. Maybe this is all for my benefit; maybe my parents think it’s their fault I went crazy, because they were so intent on their own loss that they forgot to pay attention to mine. It’s kind of a relief to have my parents back, despite everything else.

  On a Wednesday afternoon, my father knocks politely on my door, bringing a blast of cold air along with him into the room. I’ve opened my windows to let dry California air fill my room, despite the heat of the day. The rest of the house is locked shut and filled with artificially cooled air.

  “Hey, Dad,” I say, holding a new list out in front of me; I can’t stop making lists of school supplies, last-minute things to do. “Think Mom’s up for a trip to Bed Bath & Beyond today?”

  He looks at the list like it’s gibberish and looks at me like I’m speaking Greek.

  “Come on, I’ve only got a few weeks left to stock up.” It only just occurred to me to check the date this morning. Technically, it’s six weeks, since Stanford starts in mid-September.

  “Wendy,” he says gently. I’m sitting at my desk, and he walks toward me until he’s standing over me. My father is not a tall man, but I shrink beneath his shadow nonetheless. “I know this stuff has messed with your memory, but surely you remember—”

  “Remember what?”

  “They called us from Montana,” he says. “A few days ago.”

  “What’s in Montana?”

  “The center.”

  Slowly I lower myself onto my bed. They’re still sending me there? I honestly thought they’d have been over it by now. I’m back to normal. Even Nana is back to sleeping in my bed with me, nuzzling close, covering me in kisses. “Montana?”

  He nods.

  “Dad, I’m fine. It was just that one time. Surely you guys can see that by now?”

  My father shakes his head. “They told us this place is the best.”

  “Who told you?”

  “We did a lot of research for you, honey. We wanted to find the best possible place for you.”

  What kind of research could they have possibly done? They’ve never even heard of dust, so how would they know which is the best place for rehabilitation from it? Unless they think that the drug is just another of my hallucinations—and of course, they do. They must think I was on something else, something they’ve heard of, something they’ve seen covered on the news.

  “The best possible place for me is here,” I say, beginning to sweat. “If you want, I’ll talk to a therapist here.”

  He’s staring out my window, a sad but hardened expression on his face.

  “Look at me, Dad,” I say, trying desperately to keep my voice from shaking. “Look how much better I am.”

  My father shakes his head. “Your hallucinations still have a hold on you. At night, you’re still having dreams—”

  “How do you know?”

  “You shout in your sleep. A name, a place. I don’t know.”

  “Whose name?” John, I think, or Michael.

  “Pete. Every night, you shout for someone named Pete. Wendy, who’s Pete?”

  I shake my head. “I don’t remember,” I say finally. It’s not exactly a lie.

  23

  My eyes flutter open in the middle of the night. The scent of him—salt water and Tide, blue eyes and beer—fills my room. I must be dreaming. But it’s Pete’s name they say I’ve been calling in my sleep, not his.

  My windows are still open, my room cool now, after hours without sunlight. The only sound is a tapping on the glass; I look to my windows, expecting to see nothing but the night-lights shining up from the city, but instead there’s a boy scratching at the glass like a cat asking to be let inside, a boy tall and muscular, pressing my window open even wider and climbing into my room. Beside me on the bed, Nana stiffens. I expect her to bark, growl, maybe even lunge at the intruder. But she must like the smell of him, because she hops off the bed and greets him with one of her enormous kisses.

  I’m not about to do the same. Not to the man whose drugs kept me sick for weeks, who’s the reason behind my parents’ crazy idea to send me away, the reason my brothers got kicked out of Pete’s house, a home I still think of as a safe place, even after everything that’s happened.

  I do get out of bed and run past him to the window, looking for a ladder, a rope, a bunch of bedsheets tied together. How did he get up here? Our house is perched on a steep hill and made of glass. There’s not exactly much to hang on to.

  When he speaks, his voice is deep, as though strained from years of swallowing sand and salt water.

  “Wendy” is all he says. The sheepishness in his voice is hard to reconcile with his laser-sharp eyes. Or with the fact that he just scaled a wall and climbed into my bedroom.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I needed to talk to you.”

  “Ever heard of a phone?”

  “I didn’t exactly have your number.”

  I nod, backing away from him, tripping over Nana and almost falling into my bed.

  “What did you want to talk to me about?”

  “Do you remember what you said that night?”

  I shake my head, sitting down. Immediately I wish that I’d sat at my desk and not on my bed. Sitting on my bed while Jas is in the room feels too intimate.

  “I don’t remember much at all. It comes to me sometimes, in flashes, but I can’t quite put it together.”

  “That sounds like you. Trying to figure things out like
a puzzle.”

  I’m taken aback. “How do you know what sounds like me?” I ask.

  “We spent some time together, Wendy.”

  “Yeah, well, I wasn’t exactly myself then.” I pause. “How long exactly?” I’ve never been able to quite figure out just how many days I spent lost on dust before I found myself in Fiona’s driveway.

  “About two days. You were so far gone that you didn’t fall asleep once,” Jas answers, and I’m surprised that he doesn’t hesitate, doesn’t try to sugarcoat.

  “What about you?”

  “Me?”

  “Did you sleep?”

  He shakes his head. “Someone had to keep an eye on you.”

  “How did I end up at my friend’s house?”

  “On the second morning, you asked me to take you home. We were about halfway here when you started panicking.”

  “About what?”

  “Some lie you’d told your parents. You said you were supposed to have been with Fiona. So I left you there, with your car. Hitchhiked my way back to Kensie.”

  I nod.

  As though he understands, Jas adds, “Even high on dust, you were worried about the truth. Never saw that before.”

  “My brothers weren’t quite so concerned with honesty?” I spit out accusingly.

  Jas shakes his head sadly. “You talked a lot about your brothers when you were in my house,” he says.

  “I did?”

  He nods, still smiling. “Well, maybe not talked. You shouted about them, mostly.”

  “That doesn’t sound like me.”

  “You weren’t quite yourself.”

  I bristle. “Thanks to you. Your cover charge.”

  His smile vanishes. “I’m sorry,” he says. “People who come to that party know what they’re getting into, usually.”

  “Do they know about the withdrawal?” Even though I’ve felt better for a long time, my room still has a hint of illness to it, like the scent of my sickness saturated the walls.

  Jas doesn’t answer. At least he doesn’t lie.