by Hadley Dyer
Dedication
For my dear dad, William Dyer
Epigraph
Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
—Sylvia Plath, “Morning Song”
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
The Stars Go Waltzing Out
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Something in the Way
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
The Cheese Stands Alone
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Lullaby for the Cat
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
Thirty-Nine
Forty
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Books by Hadley Dyer
Back Ad
Copyright
About the Publisher
The Stars Go Waltzing Out
One
August 1992
Life’s a bad writer, my father used to say. I think he meant that most of us would write our lives differently, given the chance. If I could choose one year to rewrite, it’d be my senior year of high school, and I’d probably start with that first shack party. Or I might go even further back and make Sid stay in the valley. I always wondered how it would have worked out if the five of us had stayed together. Who knows, maybe Sid could have been the one to stop me from making such a mess of things.
Sid left early on an August morning. He came out of the house wearing his Eddie Murphy costume from the previous Halloween: leather pants, leather jacket with the sleeves pushed up, gold chain, no shirt. Natalie and I cracked up because we knew he was trying to keep us from getting emotional, Lisa burst into tears for the very same reason, and Bill blurted out that there wouldn’t be black kids at our school anymore, since Sid had been the only one.
Lisa was so mad at Bill for ruining the moment, she hardly spoke to him for a week. The freeze-out might have lasted longer, but somebody’s grandmother died, god bless her, leaving a ramshackle saltbox overlooking the bay that was perfect for a shack party. Most of her stuff had been moved out already, but there were still a few chairs and whatnot, and the taps ran and toilets flushed, which made it a five-star. When I arrived, half our school was packed into the little house, and two different Skid Row songs were blaring from competing ghetto blasters.
“Georgie Girl!”
Lisa’s boyfriend, Keith. We didn’t know each other well enough yet for him to be calling me that, but he had a joint in his hand and probably knew where Lisa was, so I smiled and pushed my way over to the staircase where he was sprawled.
“I’d offer you this, but Lisa says you’re insane when you’re high,” he said. “You punch people or what?”
“Only until they’re unconscious. Where’s Lise?”
“Living room. Hey, Joshua’s back in town, if you’re looking for some action.”
I fluttered my eyelashes at him. “But Joshua and I aren’t married.”
Keith sat up and leaned toward me, and I could see how bloodshot his eyes were already. “Why do girls always have to be in love to have sex?”
He was too stoned to be having this conversation with his girlfriend’s best friend, and I said so.
“I’m just asking.”
A flash of Lisa’s red hair in the next room. Keith had red hair too, and neither of them seemed to know how much the twin vibe creeped everyone out.
“No offense,” I said, giving his cheek a pat as I turned to leave, “but most of you suck at the sex part, so there’s nothing else in it for us.”
I crowd-paddled to the living room past town boys, farm boys, mountain boys. A bunch of them were measuring their heads with a TV cable. “One more year,” I said when I reached Lisa.
She didn’t have to ask what I meant, just handed me a sticky bottle of Long Island Iced Tea and a plastic cup. “A wise man once said, if you can’t make it better, you can at least make it blurry.”
“Which wise man was that?”
The sound of peeing from the other side of a closed door answered, so loud it seemed to be hitting the bowl from a very great height.
The door swung open. Bill was only five eight with sneakers on and had a way of walking with minimal bounce, a gliding slouch across a room. Back then he was slightly overweight and this side of slovenly, but he had honey-colored curls that no girl could resist touching and absolutely nothing embarrassed him. He was the opposite of Lisa, who was small but ridiculously strong, with huge, kinky red hair that was moussed, diffused, straightened, and sprayed to sculpture-like perfection. She carried herself so confidently, yet would be mortified by the badly timed squeak of a vinyl seat.
Bill held out a china mug with a picture of Prince Charles and Princess Di on it for me to slosh in some booze. “What?”
“Did you find that in the bathroom?” Lisa said. “You don’t even know what it was used for.”
“Let’s toast,” I said quickly, before Bill could bug Lisa with a crude joke. “To Nat and her brave battle with the Double Dragon.” (She was locked in her bathroom for the night after eating a funky pizza slice.) “To Sid and his tight leather pants—especially the leather pants. To a bitchin’ senior year. And to the five of us being together again next year, somewhere far from here.”
Lisa waved her cup vaguely toward us. “Yeah, Nat, Sid, cheers. Do you believe in love at first sight?”
“No,” I said, using the neck of the bottle to guide her cup into a more upright position.
“I do. But, George, he’s not looking at me.”
I twisted around and saw Joshua Spring angling himself into the living room.
The history here is that Joshua Spring was in love with me and had always been in love with me. It started on the first day of first grade when he trailed Lisa and me into the schoolyard at lunchtime. I reckoned he had one of two possible agendas: showing us his bird, as Dougie O’Donnell and Patrick O’Connor had done when they cornered us at recess, or stealing my Han Solo action figure. Instead, he took a plastic ring with a heart-shaped sapphire from his pocket and pressed it into my hand. Then he bolted, leaving a trail of big muddy footprints to his hiding place behind the hippo slide.
You can see under a slide, right? The only reason his head seemed to disappear into the hippo’s nostril was because he was so tall for his age. We decided that Joshua Spring was too dumb to pay any more attention to and ignored him until he moved away a few months later, after his parents split up. Every time he came back to visit his dad, he was several inches taller—and still in love with me. It was like a sickness, and by the time we got to high school, I think he kind of hated me for it.
Now here he was, hanging out with a bunch of stoned jocks, including Keith, Lisa’s boyfriend and Joshua’s default best friend whenever he came back to town. Joshua was another half foot taller since I’d last seen him, easily six three, and he was genuinely, astoundingly hot. He had a jaw, for Christ’s sake. Mos
t of the boys at our school didn’t have jaws yet, especially the jocks, with their baby fat and thick jowls. Their faces just sort of slid into their necks. And from that look Joshua gave me before turning away, I knew that however old I got, even when I was eighty and my boobs were dangling by my ankles like old-timey Christmas stockings filled with one orange apiece, Joshua would be there waiting for me. Hotly.
“He has a girlfriend,” Bill said.
Lisa stared at him. “Impossible.”
“Fact.”
“Who? He just moved back.”
“Back back?” I said. “Permanently?”
“Christina with the face,” Bill said.
“Can’t be serious,” Lisa said. “Keith hasn’t said anything about it. If they are together—ish—technically, you can’t become boyfriend-girlfriend in only a week, and—”
“Dude,” Bill said. “When’s the last time George talked to that guy? Him looking this way doesn’t mean they’re hooking up.”
I shrugged. Because Joshua was now standing in front of a crumbling fireplace that had a mirror built into the mantel, and I knew that he could see me behind him, and he was watching me watching him watching me.
I was leaning against a sideboard in the dining room, drinking directly from the bottle of Long Island Iced Tea, when Joshua finally made his move.
“Where are Lisa and Keith?” he asked. Super-laid-back. As though he hadn’t been giving me lingering looks for an hour.
I nodded toward the corner, where they’d stacked themselves on a kitchen stool. “Brother-sister quality time.”
“I’m never going to get used to that.” He took the bottle from me, sniffed it. “Jesus. It’s like plane fuel. What did you cut it with? Tap water?”
“Yup.”
“You want some of this home brew instead?”
“Nope.”
I knew one thing about the Spring family’s home brew: no one tried it twice.
“That would be a good nickname,” he said. “Home brew.” His hair was bronze colored, his skin a similar shade from his summer tan. “I guess that’s stupid.” He handed the bottle back.
“No, it’s just, you’re the most uniformly colored person I’ve ever seen.”
“I know. I’m like a big beige crayon.”
“Not beige. Camel? Bile?”
If you want to get a hot boy to headlock you, and I’m not saying I did, that’s how you do it.
“Hey! Stop putting the moves on my guy!” Christina yelled from the kitchen.
I didn’t know much about Christina Veinot: eleventh grade, popular, probably one of the Veinot Dairy Veinots from Veinot, a little ferrety in the face. But I could tell she was only partly joking and magnificently sloshed, center of gravity up in her head, makeup running, hair wet against her T-shirt. Bill had started a game of bobbing for beer caps in the corroded sink.
“We were fighting over you,” I said. “You’re so pretty.”
Joshua and I were reclining against the sideboard now. His arm felt hot against mine. I knew we looked good together, my dark Irish coloring contrasting with his beach boy glow. Lisa and Keith were grinning at us with unabashed glee.
Christina seemed to be contemplating a comeback as she stood there, head bobbling around. Then she threw her arms up and screamed, “Whoo-hooo!” which made everyone else scream, “Whoo-hooo!” and that was a shack party. That really was the best we could come up with when we all put our heads together and decided to have a good time.
“Whoo-hooo,” said Joshua, raising his bottle of home brew. His mouth grazed my hair as he leaned over and murmured, “You want to get out of here?”
“What about . . .” I nodded toward Christina.
“Oh, we’re not . . . We’re just hanging out.”
I glanced at my watch. An hour left before curfew. If I couldn’t find someone to drive me home for midnight, I’d be facing the Sergeant. Or would I? My father was—well, let’s say, under the weather. Maybe he wouldn’t be waiting up.
“I’ve had only a few sips of this,” Joshua said. “I’ll get you home on time. Promise.”
We drove to the shore, where we lit a fire and huddled together against the cold wind coming off the bay and ignored time passing. Yeah, he said something mildly ignorant about Kuwait and, yeah, something that might have been racist about Saddam Hussein, and yeah, okay, we ran out of things to say about two minutes after that, but he was sweet and he was gorgeous and he smelled like woodsmoke and strawberry gum and boy, and he looked at me like I was the only girl there had ever been.
Which is when I began to worry that he’d heard about my slutty period in eleventh grade. Nothing serious, a bit with the whooring, as Lisa put it: three guys at East Riverview, our rival high school. I’d wanted to lose my virginity with minimal fuss. Not that I wouldn’t have preferred it to be with a special someone who could make it beautiful and meaningful and full of harps and fireworks, but since there was no special someone, and not much chance of one appearing out of the fog, I wanted to get it over with. That led to crashing some parties on the other side of the county line and meeting Leon, whose most winning quality was that he was someone I didn’t have to see every day. And that led to a couple of bonus boys to confirm that the problem with sex wasn’t Leon’s undescended testicle but that sex was overrated. At least, sex with guys from East Riverview.
The new moon was bright in the sky as Joshua pulled me close. I’d made out with lots of boys, but hadn’t felt anything like real love, not since Han Solo. I’d convinced myself I wasn’t built for it, that I’d never understand a ballad. Now it was like every line of our story had been writing us to this moment by the sea, the formerly heartless girl in the arms of the perfect guy, who had been in front of her the whole time.
Soft at first, it was a whisper of a kiss, like a strawberry secret.
And then: like getting rammed with a deli-sized bologna.
“I’m so sorry,” I said, after audibly desuctioning my very wet mouth from his and dabbing it with my jacket sleeve. “I’m still hung up on Leon.”
The name just slipped out.
“Leon.”
“You don’t know him.”
“The guy from East Riverview?”
“Um . . .”
“The guy who used to go to basketball games dressed like a woodchuck?”
I’d forgotten about that. Leon had been East Riverview’s mascot in junior high. Or was it that East Riverview didn’t have an official mascot but he came to the games dressed as a woodchuck anyway? Even after they asked him to stop.
“Different Leon,” I said. “I’m sorry, I think you got the wrong idea.”
He was swallowing a lot. Oh, he was going to cry. Oh, he was crying, tears running down his cheeks, ragged breaths. He sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. I started casting around for a piece of driftwood so I could do the humane thing.
“Joshua—”
He was up and running, his giant footprints a good six, seven feet apart in the sand. After I smothered the fire, I found him in his car, face buried in his arms against the steering wheel. He mumbled something that sounded like “Just get in.”
We sped down into the valley much too fast, gravel pummeling the car like bullets. “I love this car,” Joshua said. “I love this car. I’m going to frickin’ die in this car.”
“We’re in this car!”
He swerved severely and I screamed. “Rabbit,” he said.
We didn’t speak again until he pulled up in front of my house. “Joshua . . .” The light in my parents’ bedroom snapped off. “Let’s pretend this never happened. I promise not to tell anyone if you don’t, okay?”
He tried to smile, eyes glistening with a fresh tide of woe that he was barely holding back.
“Okay, good. We’re going to have the best year. You’ll see.”
I made the mistake of deciding the phlegmy sound was Joshua Spring agreeing with me.
Two
“Leon,” Lisa said. “Of the thin li
ps. And one ball. Really.”
We were having tea with Bill and Natalie in our usual booth at the Grunt, an old-school diner with blueberry-colored walls and mismatched dishes from every decade but the one we were in. Nat was leaning on Lisa, still fragile after her bout of food poisoning, which hadn’t stopped Bill from ordering a jumbo root beer float and hoovering it down in front of her. Not that Nat ever looked sturdy. She was skinny, white blond, and tree-limbed, all long bones and sharp corners.
Lisa eased her off and scooted out from behind the table to come around to my side. She began sniffing me like a police dog searching for clues: down my hairline, along my cheekbone, around my ear, up again. She always knew when I was holding out on her, and she loved inventing new ways to make me crack. I did not flinch, I did not flinch, I did not flinch—until her tongue darted out and flicked my nose.
“Ugch,” I said, palming her face away. “Alright.”
“Alright?”
“Alright.”
“Say it.”
“I’m not hung up on Leon.”
Bill pawed a paper napkin out of the dispenser and passed it to me. “Keep licking. See what else she says.”
Lisa slid back into the booth beside Nat. “First of all, I can’t believe you thought anyone would buy that. And second—me and you, Keith and Joshua, two best friends dating two best friends? Don’t you get how perfect that would be?”
“You could date us,” Bill said, indicating himself and Nat.
I didn’t like it when Lisa called us best friends in front of the others, though it was true. You might think of your friends in tiers, but you don’t have to remind them of it.
“You’re my fourth–best friend at best,” Nat said to Bill, lowering her head to the table.
He wagged his straw at her like he was erasing what she’d said. “On the bright side, George has just become the big fish that every guy in school wants to haul into his boat, if you know what I mean. If you don’t know what I mean, I mean this bitch, right here, is now so ungettable that everyone wants to get her. And if you don’t know what I mean by get—”
“We got it,” Nat said. “While I was sitting on a toilet with a bucket on my lap, George was rejecting the hot new guy—and it only made her more popular! Bravo, life!”