Catch a Falling Star

by Culbertson, Kim

  Outside, the crowds had thinned.

  “You coming tonight?” Chloe asked Adam, still having trouble meeting his eyes.

  Adam gave me a sideways look. “What’s tonight?” We didn’t have anything in the script today except the autograph signing.

  “We’re stargazing.” I hadn’t asked him because I couldn’t imagine him wanting to sit on Alien Drake’s roof with a sandwich and a bag of Doritos. Not very glamorous. Also, Parker had insisted, Stick to the script. “We go almost every night. You know, actual stars. We like to sit on Alien Drake’s roof with a picnic and talk until it gets dark enough.”

  “Alien Drake?” Adam asked.

  Chloe stared up at Alien Drake, her face awash with affection. “We’ve been calling him that since forever because he’s obsessed with aliens.”

  Alien Drake winced. “I’m not obsessed.” He gave Adam a funny look. “Watching the stars with a star. Yeah, that’s going in the blog.”

  I rushed to explain. “Drake and I write a blog about the sky. Stars, comets … the possibility of life on other planets. It’s called Yesterday’s Sightings.”

  “A blog about aliens?” Adam looked interested. “I was in an alien movie once.”

  “It’s about a lot of things with the sky,” I explained. “Sometimes it’s about aliens.”

  “More like the possibility of aliens, of something other than us, you know, out there.” Alien Drake’s voice had gone sort of low and quiet. Was it just me or did he seem nervous? It wasn’t likely that he would be — Alien Drake cared less about Hollywood than I did — but normally you couldn’t shut him up about our blog or his extraterrestrial theories. Was it possible even he was a little starstruck?

  “So you believe in the possibility of aliens?” Adam clarified.

  Alien Drake opened his backpack and started packing the sandwiches and chips I’d set on the counter. “I believe in the possibility of a lot of things. Believing something is possible is not the same thing as believing in it.”

  Adam seemed to be genuinely trying to understand. “I guess I don’t really see the difference.”

  Alien Drake thought about it for a minute; I could see him choosing his words carefully. “Belief is a rigid thing. Yes or no. Possibility allows for all options to exist at the same time. I’m just not a black-and-white sort of person.” He zipped up the bag. “I’ve got to go get some things squared away with the scope. You guys want to meet me there? About nine to eat?” He looked at Adam. “You can come if you want, but I’m sure you have better things to do than stare at the sky with us.” Without waiting for an answer, he pushed through the door, Chloe’s concerned gaze following his retreat. She glanced at me, eyes wide.

  Adam’s phone rang and he stepped away to answer it.

  “Are you guys in a fight?” I asked Chloe quietly, moving closer to the counter, away from Adam. “Why’s he so grumpy and annoyed?” Two things Alien Drake almost never was, and certainly not at the same time.

  Chloe shook her head, watching Alien Drake cross the street outside and head toward his house. “I honestly have no idea what that was about.” She gave me a puzzled look. “I’m going to go talk to him. See you later, okay?” Before I could say anything, she left the café. I watched her dart across the street, hurrying to catch up with Alien Drake.

  Adam came up alongside me, giving me a playful nudge with his shoulder. “So, am I invited or not? Come on, I usually don’t have to wait this long for an invite to a party,” he teased.

  I tried to ignore the instant stomach flutters that seemed to emerge every time Adam did that with his voice. “Drake invited you.”

  “I want you to invite me.” This time he gave me only half a nudge, letting the side of his body lean into mine. Okay, utterly impossible to ignore the flutters now. People called them butterflies for a reason.

  I chewed my lip. “Honestly, I didn’t really think you’d want to come. And it’s not a party at all. We just sit on a roof and eat chips. You’ll be bored.”

  “I like stars. The real kind. And I like chips.” He tucked his phone away, his marine eyes pulling me in like a whispered secret.

  “It’s not in the script.”

  “You knew there’d be rewrites.” He grabbed my hand and squeezed, sending the flutters away from the safe roost of my belly and migrating south, north — everywhere.

  Talk about not being in the script.

  “Then you should come,” I managed.

  “Then I think I will.”

  The creek behind Alien Drake’s house rushed, still full from all our late May rains. We stretched out on the sloping roof, warm from the day of roasting in the sun. I loved night in the summer, the sky gone black and star-spotted, the air tinged with pine and a sudden coolness. Around the neighborhood, barbecues smoldered and people had lit their fire pits, but a hush had muted the world, giving into crickets and whispers.

  “Tell me again why people wish on stars.” Chloe tossed the ball of white paper she’d made of her sandwich wrapping from one hand to the next, her legs crossed at the ankles. Its whiteness stood out in the dark as if lit.

  Alien Drake fiddled with his telescope, his body a shadow even several steps away. “We can thank the Romans for that, though I’m sure, like with everything else, there are different answers to that question.”

  “Let’s not forget Jiminy Cricket.” I collected the chip wrappers and folded them into the bag I’d brought. Chloe tossed me her white paper ball.

  Alien Drake nodded. “Yes, thank you, Mr. Cricket, for decades of star-wishing.”

  Adam leaned back on his forearms. “What did the Romans have to do with it?” It was so weird to have him sitting up here with us, so normal in a pair of shorts and a UCLA hoodie.

  Peering into his scope, Alien Drake didn’t answer, so I jumped in, my heart strangely racing. “You can’t see it very well now, but Venus often appears as the first bright star of the night. I mean, it’s a planet, not a star, but they didn’t know that. The Romans would look to Venus and wish for love.”

  “Love?” Adam sat up, his head angled to the sky. “Not fortune? Fame?”

  Alien Drake sat down next to Chloe, putting an arm around her waist. “I like to think that love came before all those things.”

  Chloe made gagging noises. “Ugh, you’re such a girl sometimes,” but she wriggled close to him, smiling.

  Adam watched them. “Love as the first wish.” He tugged at the hem of my shorts I’d changed into until I looked at him. “It’s like what I was saying about my movie. It’s a love story.”

  “Everything is,” Chloe said, curling tighter into Alien Drake. Clearly, they’d made up after whatever that was at the café earlier. I studied them in silhouette, the way their profiles feathered with night. Yin and yang. I opened a bottle of water and took a long swallow, avoiding eye contact with everyone. Too much talk about love. It made me feel squirmy.

  “What’s it like to be so famous?” Chloe peered through the night at Adam.

  “Chloe!” I couldn’t believe she’d just come out and asked him.

  “Yeah,” Alien Drake added, ignoring me. “Is it like being a really fancy pet?”

  “Sort of,” Adam said, his head tilted toward the sky, the crickets pulsing around us. Finally, he said, “It feels very lucky and very lonely.”

  I passed Alien Drake a water bottle. “Why lonely? Aren’t you at parties and clubs all the time?”

  “Oh, sure.” He pulled his knees into his chest and wrapped his arms around them. “You’re never alone. It’s just, when people always have something to gain from you, you never really know if they like you or … whatever it is they think it means to hang out with you.”

  Chloe sighed. “So, basically, it’s like high school.”

  Adam opened his own bottle of water. “I guess. I wouldn’t really know.”

  “It’s about atmosphere,” Alien Drake said, pulling his sweatshirt out of his backpack and slinging it over Chloe’s shoulders.
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  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  Alien Drake settled back in next to Chloe. “I think people attach themselves to certain people, certain events, because those things have energy; they create an atmosphere. And there is a certain amount of energy that gets absorbed by an atmosphere. Look at the sun.”

  “Um, we’re not supposed to look directly at the sun,” Chloe teased.

  He shook his head, melting into blogger-philosopher mode. “No, I mean, a certain amount of the sun’s energy is absorbed by our atmosphere. Just being on Earth, we get those benefits.”

  “Not for long.” Chloe pulled the sweatshirt closer.

  “It’s a metaphor, Chlo — not an environmental impact report.” Alien Drake stood and, kissing her on the top of her head, went to check the scope again. He seemed his usual self now, not twitchy and grumpy like he’d been earlier at Little Eats. Maybe it had been too weird to meet Adam. Chloe did have pictures of him hanging up all over her room. That had to unnerve even the most solid of boyfriends.

  I thought about what he’d said about atmosphere. Most of us floated around seeking energy so we could just swim around in it, bask in it. And we didn’t always want to produce it ourselves. Maybe that’s why people wanted all those autographs from Adam earlier. Proof of atmosphere.

  Adam stretched onto his back, his hands tucked behind his head. “You guys always talk this much?”

  “Oh, we’re very deep.” Chloe stood, crossing to where Alien Drake stared into his scope. “Our own little brain trust.” Chloe was warming up, losing some of the nerves that had kept her acting so silly around Adam.

  I was glad Adam got to see her like this and not mute with her arms plastered to her sides. “Yeah, we’re real deep. When we’re not throwing water balloons at the Smiths’ trampoline.” I motioned toward Alien Drake’s neighbor, the ghost of the netted trampoline dark. “It’s pretty funny when they bounce and freak out his cat.”

  Adam sat up. “Next time — can we do that?”

  I smiled at him, forgetting for a minute that we weren’t just an ordinary group of friends, that he wasn’t a movie star. It was in that small bubble of ease that I heard myself say, “Sure. You’re clearly not afraid of getting arrested.”

  “Carter!” Chloe’s eyes, even shadowed, widened.

  I flushed. “What? It was a joke.”

  Alien Drake let out a low whistle through his teeth, his hand cradling the scope. “Wow, Carter, don’t pull the punch or anything.” He started to take the scope down, slipping pieces of it into its bulky black bag.

  Adam watched me, his eyes unreadable, dark like the sky. “It’s fine,” he said. “I’m sure I had that coming.”

  I hurried to fix it. “I’m sorry…. I really meant it as a joke.”

  A car slid by on the street below, lighting our faces for a sluggish second. In the passing wave of yellowish light, Adam’s face held a sadness that wasn’t just shadow, the look frozen in so many tabloid photos. Then our eyes met and he brightened slightly, the sadness rinsed, and he said, “Forget it. You were just being honest. Believe me, that’s rare.”

  Morning, sky watchers. I know we’ve talked about this before, but last night there seemed to be so many dark, blank patches in the sky that it made us think of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. Years ago, some scientists decided to point the Hubble telescope at a blank spot in space and leave it there for ten days. This might not seem like a big deal, but it was really brave because the time you get on the Hubble is really competitive and they were taking a chance they might not see anything at all. But what they saw was intense beyond their wildest expectations. They found, once they processed the data, that the blank space up there, that “nothing,” was actually over three thousand galaxies — hundreds of billions of stars. So, here these scientists pointed the telescope at nothing and found huge unknown worlds. They took a risk, and it majorly paid off. And, that’s our star-thought for today. Even when you think you’re looking at nothing, what you might not be seeing is whole galaxies.

  Think on that.

  See you tonight, under the sky.

  adam had to shoot the whole next day, so I didn’t see him. I felt terrible about my comment, and he wasn’t answering my texts, so it clearly wasn’t as okay as he’d tried to make me believe sitting there on that roof. Last night, I’d sent another text, Just saying hi. Hope you had a good day. It seemed the sort of thing a girlfriend would do (even a fake one), but he hadn’t answered.

  By the time he picked me up this morning, I’d grown anxious that I’d messed something up, mucking up the thaw that had been deepening between us over the last couple of days, but Adam seemed fine as I opened the door. He handed me an iced latte as I slipped into the backseat. “Sorry, it’s Starbucks. Is that allowed, Ms. Indie-Café?”

  I pretended to frown at it. “Oh, I don’t drink corporate coffee.” When his smile dimmed, I grabbed it. “Don’t be such an easy mark. Despite the other night, my manners really aren’t that bad. This is nice — thanks.” I pulled the door shut. “And speaking of that night, I’m sorry I was so rude.”

  He blinked at me, his eyes confused.

  I lowered my voice. “About the ‘arrested’ comment.”

  He waved me off. “You worry too much. It’s fine.”

  I swallowed my reply. I was clearly making a big deal out of nothing. Mik revved the SUV’s engine, and Adam motioned for him to go. “So, what’s in the script for us today?” His phone buzzed in his hand, and instead of diving into it, he clicked it off and tossed it onto the seat between us.

  I took a quick sip of my coffee before answering. “When I checked in with Parker yesterday, he said you wanted a tour of Little.” I leaned forward and gave Mik a few quick directions.

  Adam rested his hand on my knee and leaned close. “Well, you keep talking about how beautiful it is here. I thought you could maybe show me.”

  My heart caught like a fish in the breathy net of his voice, at how warm his hand felt on my knee. Was he flirting with me? There weren’t any photographers around. Clearing my throat, I tried to remember what Parker had said about making sure we positioned ourselves for good photo opportunities. “Parker thought we might get some good publicity shots together.” I tried to sound as professional as possible.

  Letting his hand slip from my leg, Adam tugged at his seat belt, a flash of annoyance crossing his features. “Look, don’t worry about all the publicity stuff, okay? Let’s just hang out. Parker can get a little —” He paused, taking a slurp of his own Starbucks. “Well, let’s just say he takes his job a bit too seriously sometimes. Don’t worry about the photos. Let’s just have a good day.”

  “Okay.” I pulled a sheet of heavy stock paper from my purse. Yesterday, I’d had an idea, something fun for Adam that would show him our town but also be a little silly. So after Little Eats, I’d stayed up until two a.m. finishing it. Now, clutching the handmade tour map I’d made, my idea seemed babyish, and I had a feeling it was one of those ideas that seemed brilliant at midnight but totally lame in the daylight.

  “What’s that?” He grabbed at it.

  Sighing, I handed it over. “It’s stupid.”

  He scanned the page. “Did you make this?” Now he was really laughing at me.

  I tried to grab it back. “Don’t laugh. I made you a Little Star Map. You know, like those Hollywood tours. Only it’s some of our most famous spots, famous people, famous legends. Parker said you wanted a tour of Little and, well, this is what I thought we could do. It didn’t take me very long.” I swallowed, embarrassed. He didn’t need to know I’d spent hours on it. “Forget it, it’s dumb. We should do something else.”

  He shook his head, holding the map out of my reach. “We are not doing something else; we’re doing this. I don’t think anyone’s ever made me something like this before.” He stared at the paper again, his eyes serious, a shy smile on his lips. “I can’t believe you made this.” He settled back into the seat, his gaze following a group of k
ids on the other side of the street racing down the sidewalk, dressed in already-drenched swimsuits and armed with Super Soakers, before letting those eyes, like the tide coming in, fall back on me. “Thanks,” he said.

  “Sure,” I managed, struck with the sudden, odd sensation of floating.

  Standing beneath the shade of a monster oak, I pointed at the Victorian house and Adam followed my gaze, staring up at the old house, the yard quiet in the filtered morning light.

  I leaned into the white waist-level fencing. “This is the Crowley house, hence the name of the street. Anne Crowley lived here in the late 1880s, and while it was officially a boardinghouse, most people around here know that Anne Crowley ran a pretty successful brothel out of it.”

  “So our first stop is a brothel. I like your style.” Adam peered up at the house, its green paint starting to peel at the edges. “It’s not still a brothel, is it? Because this might not be the best publicity spot for me, given my track record.”

  “No, it’s a private house now. But I chose it as our first ‘Star Tour’ spot because it’s one of our more famous ghost stories in Little. And since you’re currently starring in a movie about ghosts, I thought it’d be perfect.” I pushed through the white gate, motioning for him to follow.

  “Um, are you allowed to just walk on in there?” Adam grinned at me from the sidewalk. He seemed at ease, loose, that usual dark curtain drawn away from his face. With his hands stuck in the pockets of his knee-length shorts, it struck me that at this moment he could be any other guy at Little High. I guess, had life dealt him a different hand, he might have been.

  I held the gate for him. “It’s fine. The Roan family owns it now, and they’re gone for most of the summer. I go to school with Jack Roan, and he won’t care if I show you.”

  “Show me what?” Adam raised an eyebrow at me. I felt myself blushing and quickly turned away. He followed me around the side of the house and into the backyard. Fringed with dense trees, the yard formed a sort of skinny, sheltered triangle, one slender point of which ended at a weathered shack with no windows.