Her shoulders sagged. “I do say that. But I think there is value in building yourself first. I went to college and figured out who I was first.”
“I know who I am.” Another glance. There was something else they weren’t telling me. “What?”
Dad bit his lip. “We’re also afraid you’re staying because you think you can help your brother.”
Mom leaned toward me, resting her weight on her forearms. “He needs to get his own help, Carter. You know that, right? We can’t help him when he won’t help himself.”
I stared at her. “How can you say that? We’re his family.”
Mom sighed. “Honey, he has a serious problem. A gambling addiction.” She paused, those words floating and strange. “He keeps making bad, addictive choices. I’ve …” She pushed some hair behind her ears. “Well, I’ve been seeing someone who specializes in helping families with a member who has a gambling problem. She’s been able to give me some incredible resources.”
My heart raced. “For John? Somewhere he can get help?”
“Yes.”
“And he’s agreed to go?”
Dad’s eyes darkened. “No, not yet.”
“I’ll talk to him.” I tried to look at both of them at once, catch their eyes. I’d rather talk about John than talk about me.
Mom started to say something but bit her lip. “That’d be great.” She splayed out her fingers on the table. “But let’s not get sidetracked. We want you to put a list together for yourself.” I flinched at the word list. She hurried to say, “Just some options. Dad and I aren’t saying absolutely college, though we think you would love it, especially a program in dance therapy or something. But it could also be culinary school or a true gap year.” She smiled at my face. “Come on, this isn’t a prison sentence. You’re lucky to have these sorts of options. You should see some of what I’ve seen.” She stopped her own lecture. “Okay, no lessons, sorry. We just want you to plan for something that will teach you about what you can love and learn from beyond Little.”
Dad put his hand on my arm. “Even Hobbits have to take adventures. That’s how they bring stories back to the Shire.”
My parents were so wonderful. I knew I should feel lucky and grateful and excited. But I didn’t. I felt kicked out of my own house.
Mom stood up, arching her back. She hadn’t even showered since she got home, and she always liked a good shower after her trips. Her fingers resting on the back of my chair, she asked, “Deal?”
“Deal.” I avoided her eyes.
Morning, sky watchers. The other day, we overheard someone refer to a lonely period in his life as feeling like “a black hole.” Obviously, it’s a bummer to feel like that and we felt bad for the guy, but it got us thinking that he probably doesn’t really know what a black hole is. Because black holes are filled with so much stuff, so much dense stuff, that it’s not really about emptiness or loneliness at all. It’s about too much stuff in too little a space so there’s not even room for light to squeeze out. (At least, that’s what it seems like to us from the description on NASA’s site.) But what grabbed our attention most was that black holes often happen when a star is dying. And even cooler, we thought, was that even though scientists can’t see them, they know where they are because of the way certain stars and gases act around the black hole. They act weird. Different.
And it made us think about how sometimes we all end up orbiting a strange, dense black hole. A dying star. And it makes us act weird and different.
What do you think?
See you tonight, under the sky.
i tapped at the glass of Alien Drake’s window. It was too late to ring the doorbell, and he wasn’t answering my texts. After a few seconds, his round face appeared in the window, his eyebrows standing at attention. “Hey,” he said, sliding the window open. “You going old-school tonight?”
I could barely hear him over the hum of the air conditioner. “You weren’t answering your texts.”
He scrambled away from the window, returning with his phone. “Dead.” He held it up as evidence. Behind him, his walls were covered with star maps, pictures of planets, and a wall-sized diagram of Area 51.
I felt a deep ache for the days when we used to just lie on the floor and look at the glow of the peel-and-stick stars on the ceiling of his room, the rain falling outside. “Can you come out?”
“Roof or walk?”
“Roof.”
“I’ll get provisions.” He slid the window shut again.
In five minutes, we were sitting on an old quilt, the night a gleaming sheet above us. “So spending too much time around dying stars makes some of us act weird, huh?”
He popped open a bag of cheddar popcorn. “Glad to see you’re still reading our blog.”
I looked sideways at him. “I deserved that. I’m so sorry I’ve checked out on you. The last few weeks have been bizarre.”
He brushed some cheddar dust from his fingers. “Don’t worry, I won’t hold this against you, promise, but yeah, black holes. You. I was talking about you and your movie star.”
“I got that.” I grabbed a handful of popcorn.
“Still, you aside, it’s interesting that they used to be stars, right? Stars that essentially collapsed under their own weight.”
I chewed my popcorn. “Especially now that I’ve had a front-row seat to a star collapsing.”
Alien Drake wiped his hands on his jeans. “Your guy doing okay?”
“Right, my guy.” A streetlight kept blinking on and off, the motion sensor tripped by some neighborhood cats.
“He’s not your guy?” He opened a Diet Coke and it hissed into the night.
I shrugged, lying on my back, staring up at the dense sky. Now. Now could be the moment I told him everything, the deal with Adam to pay for John’s rehab. I could come clean and stop acting so weird.
But I chickened out. I just couldn’t handle another person’s disappointment tonight. “Show me some stars. Real ones. I don’t really want to talk about the other one right now.”
He paused, his stare covering me, knowing I’d just skipped over something he couldn’t see. Then, he recapped his drink and followed my lead, tucking his arms behind his head. “I wish I could show you Sirius right now.”
“The Dog Star?”
“Yeah. But you can’t see it now.” Around us, crickets sang, and a car passed on the road below.
Alien Drake’s voice felt like part of the night air. “It has this little companion star, a white dwarf. Its name is Sirius B, but some people call it the Pup.”
I knew that, but I humored him. “Cute.”
“Even though Sirius is this dynamic, bright star, even though it’s multicolored and spangled, it always needs its Pup. Doesn’t go anywhere without it.” He sat up again, pulling his knees to his chest. “See what I just did there.”
“Subtle.”
“More star metaphors.”
“You’re on a roll.” I sat up, too, pulling my own knees close. The thing about the Pup was he didn’t have a choice. Besides, no one ever asked him how he felt about all that glare.
I changed the subject. Again. “My parents just told me I have to leave Little after graduation, do something productive, expansive — I don’t know. Something else.” The Smiths’ dog started barking, a beagle’s long, painful bark-howl, like he was howling for me.
“They’re throwing you out of Little?”
“That about sums it up.”
“Right out on your butt?”
“Pretty much.”
He put his arm around me. “I’m so proud of your parents.”
Scowling, I shrank against his arm. “How can you be on their side?”
In that moment, the crickets seemed to take a break, and the beagle stopped its howl, leaving behind an inky sort of silence. Alien Drake sighed into it. “Oh, Carter, don’t be such a Hobbit. We’re all on your side.” I was going to punch the next person who called me a Hobbit.
“You ready
for this?” Adam asked me the next day, leaning into me, whispering into my hair.
We stood on the sidewalk outside Little Eats. Four o’clock. Time for our big public fight, the first sign of trouble. Exactly three weeks after I first saw him, a few days earlier than the original script. The picture of Adam and Beckett didn’t get much traction, but Parker didn’t want to take any chances. He needed this fight to be about my issues, my distaste for Hollywood, and not about the Butt Grab. We needed to change the story. I could see the headline already: “Big Trouble in Little Paradise” — exclamation point.
“Ready.” So I didn’t have to look at him, I surveyed the scene, spotting at least a dozen cameras waiting. The photo should be out in hours somewhere on the greedy eating machine of the Internet.
He cupped my elbow, his face serious. “You’ve been amazing through all this, by the way. I know my world’s not easy.”
My throat tightened, but I gave a casual wave of my hand. “A million birds would love this opportunity.”
He frowned. “Parker?”
“Yeah.”
“What a bunch of crap.”
But Parker was right. A million girls would have loved this opportunity. Even if half the time I felt like an overpaid, overexposed prop. But the other half had felt special. Like I was someone special.
My body tense, we walked a bit down the street, just far enough to make sure we’d collected the photographers hanging out in the Little Eats patio, letting them trail behind us like toilet paper on our shoes. When Adam felt certain we had enough of an audience, he spun around. “Could you guys leave us alone for five seconds? We’re just trying to take a walk here.”
They perked up, the collective calamity police.
I said my lines to the photographers the way Parker and Adam had coached me. “I hate this! You need to stop following us.” Adam made a show of trying to calm me down until it was my turn to lose it on him. “And you’re not helping. I can’t even talk to you without someone butting in, needing you, distracting you. I’m not cut out for all this! I just want my life back.” I personally thought this last bit was over the top, but Parker had insisted. They’d need sound bites, he’d assured me.
Adam pretended to look hurt, shocked, even. “We should talk about this later.” He tossed an apologetic grin at the photographers. They were drinking us up like lemonade.
It was too easy.
Adam called Mik, who was on standby the next street over, and within a minute, the Range Rover pulled alongside us. “Just go,” I told Adam, tossing my words to the photographers like a beach ball. “I’m walking home.” I turned away.
“Carter, wait —” Adam called after me, his voice the perfect blend of pleading and hurt.
And, just like we’d practiced, I pushed my way through the pack of cameras, wiping at tears they would think they saw, tears that weren’t really there, but that would make it into all the copy they wrote later about our fight.
I walked through the dull heat up the hill until I found myself in front of Alien Drake’s house. He wasn’t home. I leaned my head onto the stained glass window on his front door, my legs wobbly. The fight had been only minutes and a complete invention, but my insides still felt hollowed out. I wasn’t a fighter, fake or otherwise. Turning, I saw the fan still propped there from the day I’d argued with Alien Drake, its white plastic blades dusty, and the whirl of my life hit me.
Sitting down on the first step of Alien Drake’s porch, I cried.
For real this time.
And it wasn’t for Adam, for our fight, or for the beginning of us ending things. Everything with Adam was too new to cry like this. I had too many other things I’d tucked away, shelved in some sort of dark-hearted bookshelf. My grandmother, my brother, my dancing, my future somewhere unknown, somewhere that wasn’t Little. A future that had always loomed, even in the easy years of being a kid, because people imagined things for me outside of here.
Why weren’t we whole until we’d left ourselves behind?
“Carter?” Chloe stood holding Alien Drake’s hand on the walk. “Are you okay?”
I held up my phone. “I was just about to text you, I swear.” The path blurred with my tears, but soon, they were both sitting on either side of me on the steps.
“What happened?” Alien Drake asked, setting down the bag of Burger Town he’d been holding. I could smell the grease and salt and warmth from it.
I sniffed. “Did you get fries?”
He fished out the fries and some ketchup packets, and I dragged a fry through the puddle of ketchup Chloe hurriedly made on some folded napkins.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
I shrugged, sipping the root beer Drake handed me through its straw. I watched the brown liquid move up and down. “Adam and I had a fight.”
Alien Drake unwrapped a burger and bit into it. Chloe shot him a withering glare. “What? She’s eating.”
It made me laugh, how regular and expected their exchange was, how familiar. “I’m okay, I am. I just thought …” I searched for what wouldn’t feel like a lie. “I thought I might know him, but I don’t think I do. His world’s just too different.”
“People from different worlds can work out,” Chloe insisted, sweeping another fry through the ketchup. “I mean, what if you’re star-crossed lovers and meant to be?”
I glanced sideways at Alien Drake, who hid a smile. Chloe’s Shakespearean knowledge could be sadly lacking at times. “Yeah, the whole star-crossed-lover thing doesn’t usually work out. It more often ends with stabbing and poison.”
Chloe rolled her eyes. “I meant fated. Don’t be such a book snob.”
Alien Drake finished his burger. “What happened?”
As the neighbor’s sprinklers came on next door, as a woman jogged by with a baby stroller, as all the ordinary neighborhood movements sighed around me, it struck me that I wouldn’t have to lie to them. What was wrong with me and Adam had nothing to do with our arrangement. It had to do with us.
“I don’t ever know what’s real,” I told them. “It’s too much, all the cameras in my face. His whole image … he’s being constantly built. He doesn’t just live a life — he invents a life. Every day. For millions of people to wonder about. He walks around as his own reality show. And sometimes, it’s just too hard to separate the different versions he puts out there. Like, what I knew about him from tabloids and stuff — for the most part that doesn’t match up with how he’s been with me. Then, sometimes it does, and it’s so confusing.”
Alien Drake watched a pack of teenagers drive by in a green Jeep, each dressed in some version of river clothes. “I don’t think anyone ever knows what’s real.”
I pulled my eyes from the Jeep. “What do you mean?”
“Facebook’s the perfect example.”
“You know I don’t have a Facebook page.” Parker had said that my not having a Facebook page had been one reason they thought I’d be a good fit for their plan. Other than our blog, I spent basically no time online.
Alien Drake ran a hand through his hair. “Okay, but think about it. Not just Facebook. Everything. We’re all trying to post our best features. Pictures, texting, just standing in line at the post office, we only give people the bits we want them to see. We walk around updating our status so people only get a version of us. Online, people have their own image-controlled environment. When I’m online, I talk about our blog, or a restaurant I liked, or share a book I’ve read or a movie I’ve seen. It’s all a part of me, but it’s not the whole story. Adam Jakes plays that game as an extreme sport. He’s like an Ultimate Fighter of the social media world.”
I chewed a fry. “But people get a sense of you. The real you. Even if it’s just little bits.”
He fished around in the bag for some more fries. “Maybe. But I only let them see certain things. Planned things. Controlled things. The tabloids are all controlled. Reality TV is controlled. Even if it’s not scripted, the producers make choices. They edit thin
gs together to create whatever image they’re going for. To create a story. Maybe you’ve only read someone else’s Adam story and now you’re getting to know him. You’re getting to write your own story.”
“But I’m not getting to know him. I don’t know what’s him and what’s his act — his actor face or his real face.” As I said it, I thought about my brother, and how he had a face just for me. Being two-faced was usually an insult, but maybe we all had two faces or three or a dozen? Were there different versions of me out in the world depending on the parts I shared at certain times? It was weird to think one person might see me one way and another person might have a totally different impression of me based on a separate list of experiences.
“I just want to know the truth,” I said finally, watching a family walk by on the sidewalk. The little girl with them, maybe three, straggled behind, tugging at the end of a yellow balloon, watching it dance above her head.
Alien Drake watched them, too. “I’m not sure there’s such a thing as a single truth. Just a whole bunch of different renderings.”
A sprinkler came on across the street, dotting the asphalt of the road with tiny black specks. “That’s scary,” I told them.
Chloe tucked her dark hair behind her ears, watching me with her cool eyes. “I know.”
I glanced between the two of them. “Do you guys ever think about all of this just ending?”
“Like the end of the world?” Chloe’s eyes widened.
“No, like the end of our world.”
They each wound an arm around me and squeezed, a friend sandwich. They didn’t have to say it for me to know the answer.
Across the street, a man leveled his camera at us from a parked car the color of sand. He took a few shots and then pulled away.
Chloe clapped her hands together. “Oh, do you think that will be in People? Will I get to be the friend whose shoulder you cry on?” She stood, trying to catch sight of the beige sedan before it turned the corner.
I tugged at the back of her shirt. “You’re always that friend, dummy.”
Catch a Falling Star Page 20