#Moonstruck_A #Lovestruck Novel

by Sariah Wilson

  Before he could respond, I said, “Thanks for nothing, you, you . . .” Angie didn’t let me finish and literally pushed me away from the room made of curtains and out the locker-room door. There was a different guard posted outside, which was good because I might have had some things to say to Fox about his poor job-choosing skills.

  Angie kept quiet, clear up until we got to the parking lot. “Do you really still have that rule about not dating musicians?”

  It was highly satisfying to slam my car door after we got in. “Yes. Now more than ever.”

  The one consolation? I’d never have to see Ryan De Luna again.

  The next day, despite being exhausted, I made my weekly visit to see Cynthia. After signing in, I followed the orderly out to the gardens. “Maisy’s here to see you, Cynthia,” he said with a calming smile. I thanked him, and he said he’d be nearby if I needed him, but I had this down to a science and didn’t foresee any trouble.

  “Hey, Cynthia. Remember me?” I asked, sitting down next to the box where she was planting daisies, her favorite flower. I don’t know why I asked her that every time. The answer was always no.

  She frowned, her brows furrowing over her chocolate-brown eyes. “I don’t, I’m sorry. Do I know you from school? They said I had an accident, and I have a hard time remembering things.”

  “It’s okay. I brought you some brownies.” I offered her the covered plate and was rewarded with a huge smile.

  Cynthia took off her gardening gloves and dropped them on the grass. She took the plate from me. “I love brownies! They’re my absolute favorite. My mom seriously makes the best ones. She said someday she’ll share her secret recipe with me.” She pulled back some of the tinfoil and broke off a small piece of a brownie to try. “Yours are pretty good. I don’t want to eat too much, though. Prom’s coming up soon, and I think Scottie Weinstein is going to ask me, and I’ve already picked out the cutest dress to wear. I just can’t put on any weight.”

  Every time I came to visit, the doctors instructed me to play along, to not remind her that there would be no prom. That unless she had a miraculous recovery, she’d never leave this facility again.

  “That sounds like a lot of fun. What is Scottie like?”

  “Tall. Cute. Funny. But most important, he’s a drummer. In a band.” Despite her protests to the contrary, I noticed she had polished off an entire brownie, one tiny piece at a time. “I love musicians.”

  That made one of us.

  “And . . . music. I love music. I mean, have you ever listened to Abbey Road? That album seriously changed my entire life.”

  “I have. It’s cool.”

  “Totally.” She nodded. We talked music for a while, which was what we usually did when I came to visit. It was a safe subject, something that didn’t agitate or upset her. Other acceptable topics included prom and how excited she was for it, or her gap year and how she planned on backpacking all over Europe. How her parents wanted her to go to Yale, but she wanted to attend Sarah Lawrence. It was exciting how well she communicated today. How smoothly our conversation flowed. That wasn’t always the case.

  I glanced at my watch. Trial and error had taught me that even though she seemed perfectly fine, half an hour was about all she could tolerate. “It’s been great chatting with you, but I’ve got to get going. I’ll see you next week, okay?”

  “Okay. Thanks for the brownies. Hey, what did you say your name was again?”

  “Maisy.” The word caught in my throat because I knew what she was going to say next.

  It was what she always said.

  “Maisy? Really? That’s so random. That’s my mom’s name.”

  “I know. You named me after her.” I whispered the words, not wanting to cause another meltdown where she would have to be sedated. There was nothing worse than seeing your own mother being held down, screaming hysterically, and not being able to do anything to help her.

  “What?” she asked.

  “I said that is random. And a fun coincidence. I’ll see you soon.”

  I had to hurry up and walk away before I started crying in front of her. That usually set her off, too.

  My mother had been diagnosed with a severe traumatic brain injury after she’d run her car into a telephone pole when I was fifteen years old. When she woke up from her coma, she thought she was eighteen years old and still living at home. She didn’t recognize her own children. Initially she was diagnosed with transient global amnesia. A woman in England had gone through something similar. She thought she’d gone to bed as a fifteen-year-old and woken up in a thirty-two-year-old’s body, but that woman had eventually recovered. The hope was that Mom would do the same.

  My three brothers and I took her home, told her who we were. She didn’t believe us. She didn’t remember us. Seeing her reflection in a mirror spun her out of control. Fitz had just turned twenty-one, Parker was nineteen, and Cole and I were fifteen. We were all so young. None of us knew what to do, how to help her. Nothing worked. Not the psychiatrist’s visits, the medicines, multiple trips to the ER. The part of her brain that allowed her to form new long-term memories had been irreparably damaged. She was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s, in part caused by genetics and partly due to the accident. When she was lucid, she was Cynthia van der Bos, the year before she met my father. The psychiatrist suggested that her teen years had become a refuge for her mind, a safe place to forget about the horrific accident and what my father had put her through.

  When it became clear she wouldn’t get better, we were advised to put her in an assisted-living facility where they could watch over and help her. We were able to afford it only because my maternal grandparents had been really well off. My father had never contributed a single penny in child support; our mom had used her inheritance to take care of us. She’d paid cash for the Craftsman-style cottage in Venice Beach where I still lived with my siblings. We’d never gone without.

  Until recently.

  Because inheritances didn’t last forever.

  “How’s your mom?” Angie asked me as I stepped inside the main building. She wore her favorite lavender scrubs and handed off a patient file to a coworker at the nurses’ station.

  “Good. This was a good day.” This facility was how Angie and I had met. She had started working at Century Pacific Assisted Living three years ago. I had come to visit my mother on my nineteenth birthday. Cynthia couldn’t talk, couldn’t stay still. My being there only made her episode worse.

  Angie found me sitting in the lobby, crying uncontrollably. She put her arm around me, told me everything would be okay. I wasn’t upset that I couldn’t talk to my mom. I was upset because now I was officially “older” than she thought she was. In her mind she would stay young forever, like some kind of YA vampire, while I kept aging and aging. For some reason, that broke my heart. Angie promised she would keep a special eye on my mother and would be there anytime I needed to talk.

  She’d been my best friend ever since.

  “I’m glad she’s doing well. It’s time for my break. Want to do a lap with me?”

  I nodded, and we went outside. The grounds had a large, looping asphalt path enclosed by high honeysuckle bushes and the fence they covered up. Sometimes I walked here with my mom, if she was feeling up to it.

  “How is Hector Jr.?” I asked.

  Her whole face lit up. “He is the cutest toddler in the whole world. Even when he gets up five times in a single night because his mommy went out and he didn’t like it.”

  “Poor baby.” I wondered if now would be a good time to mention my plan to marry her off to Fox so she could have his babies. What do they call fox babies? Kits? Then she wouldn’t have to go out at night and could stay home and be a boring married person—making herself, Fox, and Hector Jr. extremely happy.

  “But I don’t want to talk about my lack of sleep. I want to talk about whatever was happening last night with you and Ryan De Luna.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  I actually
tripped over my own feet. “What?”

  “There was something there last night. With you and Ryan.”

  “You are certifiable. Which is probably okay, given that you’re currently surrounded by doctors who can treat you.”

  She nudged me with her elbow. “I’m being serious. There was this, I don’t know, fiery spark or something. Like if you’d been alone with him in that room, the whole place would have burned down.”

  Angie always had been prone to romantic delusions. “If it had burned down, it would have been because I was trying to destroy the evidence and the body. The only thing between us was a mutual disgust and animosity.”

  I could see I hadn’t convinced her, so I pressed on. “Why are you even bringing it up? It’s not like we run in the same social circles. I won’t see him again.”

  “Not unless it’s meant to be.”

  My best friend fervently believed in “meant to be.” I blamed her mother for all the telenovelas.

  It didn’t help things that Angie’s own love story had started because of “meant to be.” She’d recounted it a dozen times. She’d been late to an interview. Her alarm didn’t go off. The water in the shower wouldn’t turn on. Her dog threw up all over the outfit she’d chosen to wear. Just one delay after another.

  And then, right as she was turning into the parking lot of her new potential employer, Hector ran into her, giving her a mild case of whiplash. I’d told her more than once that I didn’t think bodily injury via vehicular accident was particularly romantic, but Angie insisted it was. That if she hadn’t been late, if so many things hadn’t gone wrong, if she’d been just ten seconds earlier or ten seconds later, they wouldn’t have met. Hector felt so bad about her injury that he stayed with her in the hospital until her family arrived and then came over to check on her every day for a week. By the end of that week, they knew they’d be together for the rest of their lives.

  But neither of them had known just how short that would end up being.

  “Not everyone can have love at first crash. Which is another reason to never fall in love. My insurance rates wouldn’t recover.” Parker had a nasty habit of parking in illegal zones whenever he took the van out, and we had a small mountain of unpaid tickets. “Last night was not ‘meant to be.’ Last night was only about you meeting him. Nothing else.”

  “Well, I thought Ryan was very charming. Didn’t you think so?”

  See? Moonstruck. “No. He was a punk.”

  “Only to you. I wonder why?” Her voice sounded sincere, but I saw the mischievous twinkle in her eye. Like his punkness had meant he liked me.

  But this wasn’t elementary school. We weren’t six years old, and he didn’t pull my pigtails.

  I tried a different tactic. “We don’t have anything in common.”

  Angie started ticking off fingers. “You’re both beautiful, you both love music, and you both lost your moms.”

  “His mom died. Mine’s still here.”

  She squeezed my forearm, not saying what I knew we were both thinking. That in a way, my mom had died. Physically she was here, but mentally she hadn’t been herself in almost seven years.

  One last-ditch effort. “Can I again refer you to the disgust and animosity part?”

  Angie shrugged one shoulder, as if that didn’t matter. “Musicians are passionate people.”

  “I’m not passionate. I’m the Ice Queen.” A name bestowed upon me by Chuck Glass senior year when I’d punched him in the esophagus after he’d lured me under the bleachers. (Another thing brothers are good for—teaching you how to throw a really effective punch.) Chuck had told anybody who would listen that I was so frigid I’d give Frozen’s Elsa a run for her money. The nickname had stuck, in part because Cole thought it was hilarious and encouraged it. He shortened it to IQ, which he pronounced ick. He especially liked that it made the guys at school leave me alone. “Keeping them away from you is a full-time job,” he’d muttered. I’d angrily told him I didn’t need a chaperone and then demonstrated my throat-punching skills on him, which he rated as two thumbs-up after he stopped writhing around on the floor.

  “You’re not the Ice Queen. You just don’t know it yet.” Angie checked her phone. “We should probably head back.”

  Despite me repeatedly explaining my rules to Angie over the years, she didn’t seem to believe me when I said the musician thing would never happen. Especially Rule #2.

  We turned around, and I wondered whether anything she’d just said had merit or if she was such a hopeless romantic that she saw potential even where none existed.

  “If Ryan’s not happening, I noticed you did seem to like the guitar player. Which I get. What is it about guys in a band that women like so much?”

  “I actually know this.” It was something I’d researched because I didn’t understand how a bunch of gross nerds like my three brothers had a line of pleeches waiting backstage after every show. One blog I read suggested that it was because musicians knew they could get whoever they wanted, making them generally disinterested, detached, and noncommittal, which women apparently found irresistible.

  A study found that musical ability had a high correlation with levels of prenatal testosterone. Which meant musicians were more athletic, healthier, and more likely to create a baby. Something apparently no woman’s ovaries could resist. “Some of it is social proof. When a guy is onstage performing and every woman around you wants him, that makes him valuable. If you’re the one who gets him, you win. We’re a generally competitive animal.” Which was how I explained my reaction to Ryan last night. It had been all the screaming groupies who wanted him. That was why I had been attracted to him until he opened his mouth.

  That he was retina-melting hot had nothing to do with it.

  Not wanting to dwell on my mental image of him, I kept talking. “Charles Darwin said musical ability came to be only in order to charm the opposite sex. A caveman who learned to sing and make music was so superior at basic survival skills that he had free time to become artistic. Which made him more attractive as a possible mate.”

  “Huh.” Angie seemed to be weighing my overexplanation. “I thought it had something to do with their innate rhythm onstage, translating to other areas.” She laughed while I blushed and continued on. “Sorry! Didn’t mean to scorch your virgin ears. But if it’s an evolutionary thing, that means you can’t do anything to stop it. You have to be with Ryan. For the good of the species.”

  Now I giggled, glad I could dismiss my physical reaction to him for what it was—pheromones and cavewoman instinct.

  Even if my lizard brain wanted him for his baby-making ability, it didn’t matter. It wasn’t like I worked with the guy or something. I thought I’d never see him again.

  If only I’d known then what was about to happen.

  It wasn’t until later that evening that I realized I couldn’t find my cell phone.

  “Parker, have you seen my phone?” I pulled my bed away from the wall, thinking the phone might have slipped down the side. No luck.

  My second-oldest brother paused at the doorway, putting on a jacket. The smell of his cologne filled the room. He’d put on too much, as usual. “Your room looks like a crime scene. Why would I have seen your phone?”

  “I don’t know. I can’t find it.”

  “You say that like this is the first time that’s happened.”

  “Shut up.”

  He laughed. “Awesome comeback, Maze. Where’s the last place you had it?”

  “If I knew that,” I muttered through clenched teeth, “I would have it back already.” I was forever losing my phone. I had thought seriously, more than once, about supergluing it to my hand. If I didn’t love playing my guitar so much, I probably would have.

  There was no money to buy a new one, so I had to find it.

  “Hey, how’s your friend Angie doing?” Despite the fact that he was a total computer geek, Parker was a capital-P player and had his own personal harem—an ever-rotating roster of women w
ho would drop everything just for the chance to hang out with him. He’d recently decided he should add Angie to that list. I think he did it mostly to annoy me.

  It worked. “You stay away from Angie.”

  “She’s hot.” He made that statement as if it excused any dog behavior on his part.

  “I’m serious. Leave her alone. I found her future husband.” When I said that, Parker’s face turned pale. The thought of commitment freaked him out even more than it did me, and that was really saying something.

  He held up both his hands like he was surrendering. “Okay. I’ll stay away from Angie. For now.”

  I threw my pillow at him, which he easily sidestepped while laughing. My aim was pretty bad.

  Which was probably a family trait, given the current urine-splattered state of our bathroom.

  “If you’re done hurling things at me, I’m going out for a few hours.”

  Given that he was near my room, that meant he was sneaking out. “Through the back door?”

  The always upbeat, always happy Parker actually frowned. “Fitz is stressing, and I don’t want to deal with him right now. See you later.”

  I heard the back door close quietly as he left. I should have reminded him not to park anywhere stupid, as he typically did.

  Well, I had officially ransacked my own room and come up short. Parker said he hadn’t seen it. Maybe Cole had.

  I went across the hall and knocked on the door of his room. No response. I opened the door and stepped into the darkened bedroom. “Cole?”

  He was already asleep, snoring softly. He worked the early-morning shift (starting at 3:00 a.m.) at the bakery around the corner. Which meant that he usually went to bed early. On nights we had gigs, he would leave straight from the show and go to work. Doing my best not to disturb him, I looked around for my phone.

  There was one recharging on his nightstand, but it was Cole’s phone. I picked it up and used the flashlight app to search his room.