The Language of Stars

by Louise Hawes

  The cove. It was the Untouchables’ meeting place at the beach. It was where we put on ridiculous pageants that involved Esther Williams choreography and a lot of splashing. It was where Thea brought picnics that featured food from all the books she loved (James’s giant peach, honey from Winnie-the-Pooh, roasted potatoes from The Secret Garden), and where Eli and Marcia divided us into debate teams to wrestle with burning issues like, Daylight saving time: boon or bust?

  Not exactly the sort of party Fry and I were invited to almost every weekend now: Music too loud to talk. Food that came in microwavable bags. Couples wrapped around each other in the pitch black.

  “I can’t come.” I said it before I even knew it was true. Instinctively, like kicking your leg when the doctor taps your knee with that little silver hammer. Only in this case the hammer was Wanda’s brave smile, her standing there as if Fry had never happened. As if I hadn’t already left her world behind, hadn’t traded the comfort of the Untouchables for a heady, scary realm where cool came first, and beer and sex trumped brains and costumes from the thrift shop.

  I went on to make an excuse so lame it needed crutches, something about studying and working for my mother. I think I even threw in a low-grade fever. It doesn’t matter what I said, because when I watched her smile melt away, I knew Wanda didn’t believe a single word. Her new expression was halfway between embarrassment and dismay. “I’m sorry,” she told me finally. “I was hoping you’d be there.”

  We talked a little bit more, but you could tell she’d decided to stop hoping. “Alicia’s putting real rose petals on the cake,” she told me just before the bell rang. “And Brett’s finished the blueprint for his biggest sand castle yet.”

  See what I mean? Would you trade an ergonomically designed sand castle for being at the top of the social ladder? A place where you helped plan what everyone else (except maybe a few holdouts like the Untouchables) thought and wore and did? Would you give up the blood rushing to your head as the prince touched you in places you didn’t even know you had for a slice of birthday cake, roses or no roses?

  Not that I didn’t sometimes think about the laughs my Pack and I had shared, and the whispering, and yes, the crazy, brainy fun. But it was like hearing talk from that kitchen way, way downstairs. So far down that it felt harder and harder to go there. Instead, I drowned out the distant noise, the background hum of missing. I kept busy, I kept moving. In fact, between the AP science courses my mother insisted I needed for premed, and my weekend job at Mamselle’s, there was barely enough time for my most important concentration of all—kissing Fry.

  Mistake with a Capital M

  Old-fashioned princesses had it easy. They just clasped their hands to their silky bosoms whenever their princes jousted in a tournament. They sat in the bleachers on pillows and waved their handkerchiefs and said things like, “Forsooth, methinks Prince Harold is taking a beating.”

  But the thing about Fry was, he liked his women wading into battle right alongside him. Helpless damsels weren’t his style, which was why he’d dared me to read that script the night we kissed. And why he always chose girls who could match him step for step, sip for sip.

  I guess that’s what I was trying to do when Fry talked H and me into the escapade that landed us in court and made us loathsome bottom-feeders in the eyes of our families, our town, and people all over the country who’d never even met us. The three of us were sitting on H’s porch—Mom and Fry’s mother were both home, but H’s parents worked the night shift. We spent a lot of time there now, after school, sprawled in the peeling wicker chairs or balancing drinks on the porch rails. It was the end of March, and the afternoons were getting warmer; you could smell the ocean, inhale it as you talked.

  So when Fry suggested a party during spring break, it sounded like just the kind of fun to carry us through the wet, weary transition to summer. “We all need this,” he said, helping himself to a chip from the bowl in my lap. “Surf’s no good, and hurricane season is still months away. Gotta shake things up, right?”

  I loved the idea. Why wouldn’t I? After years of spending most parties in the basement with a small, earnest group who shared how superior we felt to the shallow people with dates having noisy, drunken fun in the rest of the house, I was more than ready to have my own shallow fun. And to be part of the group that planned it.

  But when Fry announced the site of our bash, I suddenly felt like someone designing my own funeral. I would rather he had picked any other place on Earth. I would never have smiled and nodded, never agreed to spread the word to the theater kids, if I’d known what he had in mind. But that was before I learned the Fry Entertainment Formula. When it came to parties, he said, you had to consider three things: location, location, and location.

  “The Baylor house is perfect,” he told H and me. I loved the way he sat, one sneaker braced against the rails, the other side by side with my own sandaled foot. “It’s off a long road behind trees. Plus, it’s on the right side of town. The side no one goes to.”

  It was true. On the bay side, Whale Point had sort of given up on tourists. In the summer, it was full of mosquitoes, and most of the stores sold stuff like auto parts and plumbing supplies, not the bikinis, surfboards, and shell sculptures that filled the windows in shops on the ocean side. Except for Mamselle’s, there wasn’t much to draw people to Plantation Drive. Not even Rufus Baylor. Sure, everyone knew the People’s Poet was from North Carolina, but not many guessed that he used to spend summers in this town when his kids were little.

  “Isn’t that cottage sort of . . . small?” I asked it like I was seriously considering Fry’s idea, not fighting the impulse to stand up and scream, No! No! I’d been hiking up to the place for months now, and it felt like my own personal secret, one I didn’t want to share. One I was pretty sure my prince and his friend would never understand, even if I tried to explain it.

  H pulled his usual satellite routine, totally agreeing with his jefe, shutting me out. “That is high and sly,” he told Fry, yes-man enthusiasm nearly sending him off the railing where he was perched. “Raising hell in the woods in the dark. Chido! ”

  Not that Hector Losada needed to worry about the size of that little house, anyway. Unless you counted Fry and me, and maybe one or two other kids, he didn’t really have any close friends. He was like a stray Fry had picked up and taken in, a stray that pretended he’d been part of the in crowd all along. I gave him a withering, what-do-you-know stare, and appealed to Fry. “Don’t we need some place the whole class can fit?”

  “You mean herds of nerds?” Fry tilted his chair back and laughed at the thought. Even though he was talking about most of the kids I’d hung out with until this year, I couldn’t help smiling. He simply had no idea I wasn’t prom queen material. Which was one reason I’d fallen so hard for him. That and how awful he was at karaoke. And oh, yes, the way his kiss sucked all the air out of me.

  “This party’s only for brave hearts who know how to get down.” Some people are inspired by a painting or a view from a mountaintop, but Fry was on fire with a different vision—a picture of kids and kegs packed into Baylor’s cottage, my cottage. “What do you say, Sar?”

  I wanted to say yes. I wanted to say, Sure, my prince, my one and only. I wanted to tell him, No problem. That’s what the love interest in the action films Fry favored always said—“no problem.” “No problem, I’ll go check out the bad guy’s apartment.” Or “No problem, I’ll act as bait for the serial maniac.” But I couldn’t get the words out. It would be like drinking in church to hold a bash in that little house.

  “It depends on how many names are on your guest list,” I told him, no still thumping away in my chest. “It’s not like a mansion or anything.” The cottage wasn’t really big enough for a party, but it was just small enough to feel safe. Special.

  “Perfect. Because this will be a very select gathering.” Fry sounded as if the invitations had already been sent. Invitations that, of course, would not go to any of
the Untouchables. Wanda and George were major poetry fans, anyway, and would have been furious if they’d gotten wind of my boyfriend’s plans. Not to mention, Wanda had dealt herself a socially fatal blow with her preference for soft ballet over hard rock. So I never even suggested including them.

  “H and I will scope the place out tomorrow. Hell, we may even take the tour.” Fry smiled his badass smile at H, which was sort of like using a blowtorch to light a cigarette.

  “For sure, ése.” Hector, whose parents were from Costa Rica, but who couldn’t roll an R if his life depended on it, fell right into line. “That way, we can figure where to put stuff, find out if there’s an alarm system.”

  Fry nodded. “You can come with us, right, Sar?”

  I loved that he wanted me along, that I was part of the plan, that the blowtorch was turned on me now. Fry’s smile wasn’t secret and shy, like Nella’s. He could have used it to sell lakefront property in the desert.

  “Plus, we could bring back some brochures and stuff.” Fry was full steam ahead, scheming. “That should get us out of at least one English class, right?”

  H and I didn’t understand, so Fry let his chair fall forward, leaned toward the two of us, and used his fingers to count it out. “One: The Baylor house is where Rufus H. Baylor wrote. Two: We will be in the Baylor house. Three: We will bring back talking points. Four: Miss Kinney is in total love with Baylor, which means, five, she will spend the entire period telling us how much.”

  He snapped his counting fingers and grinned at me. “See?”

  I nodded. I still wanted to say yes to this craziness. I loved making Fry happy, setting off the sort of growl/cheer thing he did in his throat, watching him high-five H, then grab my hand like it was the most natural thing in the world. “Well, I—”

  “That is way past gross!” H was not saving me from a tough spot; it was just that he had this unrequited thing going with our English teacher. “Kinney is completely hot. But Mr. Iambic Whatever must be at least a million years old.” He stopped, tried to remember. “Or maybe he’s dead. Is he dead?”

  “I can’t take the tour,” I said. “I have stuff to do.” My head was glad I’d bowed out, but my heart wasn’t sure. I watched the car lights winking on along Shore Drive and told myself I hadn’t exactly lied. How could I explain that visiting my dollhouse with somebody else would spoil everything? Even if that somebody set off little electric charges everywhere he touched me.

  “Tours mean the place is sort of in the public eye, right?” With any luck, H would keep asking questions, and Fry would give up on the whole idea. “Isn’t it, like, historically reserved?”

  “Historically preserved,” I told H. “And yes, it definitely is.” The house had a tiny, polite sign on the door to prove it: THIS LANDMARK IS MAINTAINED BY THE NONPROFIT FRIENDS OF HISTORIC WHALE POINT. THANK YOU FOR YOUR DONATION.

  “But there’s nobody around at night.” Fry was not letting go. Giving up wasn’t in his DNA. “If we’re careful, no one will even know we were there.” He lowered his voice to a whisper, but grinned fiendishly. “Without a trace!”

  If he hadn’t put his arm around me as he said this, I might have mentioned a few pertinent details. Including the fact that Fry was not exactly famous for being careful. And the fact that the last full-scale WPH (go, Whales!) party had ended with one kid walking out a window and being taken to the hospital.

  But I guess it was the casual tenderness, the way Fry curled around me as if we were family, that froze me. That kept me, in the end, from fighting the bash. You see, if Katherine Wheeler’s daughter knew anything, it was the difference between a fairy tale and real life. In a fairy tale, the prince holds you and stares deeply into your eyes. In real life, you have to keep his hands out of your pants.

  “There are only two things a man wants from you,” Mom used to tell me from so early on, I’m not sure that, in the beginning, I had any idea what she was talking about. “One of them is to get you to listen to his nonsense. And the other is to knock your feet off the floor.”

  So far, my limited experience had proved her right. Fry loved me hanging on his every word. And he also loved trying to push me into sex. Which is why, when it wasn’t about that, when his arm around me felt like love, not pressure, I wanted it to last. Don’t move. Don’t talk. Stay.

  Besides, even if I’d taken the time to explain what a bad idea the party was, H would just have jumped into devoted-hound-dog mode and disagreed with everything I said. His goal in life was to cover Fry’s back, front, and sides. So, no, I never really tried to stop them. No, I never dreamed H would be dumb enough to put directions to the old Baylor place on his Facebook page. Or that word would get out on the Net and people I didn’t even know would be telling me about the bash. And yes, after all that happened, things definitely got out of hand. Way out of hand.

  * * * *

  Four of us headed to the Baylor place over an hour before the party was supposed to start. We weren’t the first ones there, though. By the time we’d followed the road up to the cottage, there were several dozen kids already standing by the front gate, waiting like they were behind the velvet rope of some big-city club. It felt different, my secret house, with so many people clustered around it.

  “I don’t like everyone out here while it’s still light.” Fry surveyed the group, some with bottles in not-very-discreet brown paper bags. “Let’s get them inside.” You could see he hated the thought of a party stopped before it got started. He didn’t play a single sport. He never got As. But he was a born leader when it came to having a good time.

  H’s brother, Span, who was home from college and who’d bought beer for us, reached over and opened the latch on the gate the way I showed him. I went through first, then H and Span and Fry. Everyone else trooped in behind us. Each step I took, the whole group followed—their shadows, their feet, their laughter strung out across the yard.

  Even from the beginning, then, something felt wrong. But the way Fry treated me? That felt way beyond right: He looked at me as though I was the most important person there, the Resident Expert on All Things Baylor. He kept checking in, consulting me every few minutes: “Sarah, what’s that shack out back?” (He and H hadn’t been able to prowl around the yard on the tour, but my nocturnal visits gave me free roaming privileges.) I told him the Great One’s summer quarters included a tiny toolshed, filled with old rakes and mowers and shovels. “Hey, Sar, how far to the water? Is there a dock out there?” (All the trees had leafed out and fattened up with spring. You couldn’t see the strip of sand a few hundred yards past the stand of pines behind the porch.) And yes, there was a string of wood planks that ventured into the water, though they looked more like kindling than anything you’d want to trust your weight on. “Got the keys to the kingdom, Sar?” That last was a joke, since the plan had been to pick the lock all along.

  H had come prepared. He pulled a coat hanger out of his backpack and started wiggling it in the keyhole on the front door. I hated the way he brandished that hanger, the way he flexed his fingers like a movie burglar limbering up before a heist. He knew from the tour that there was no burglar alarm, so he spent a good fifteen minutes fiddling, fiddling. Pretty soon, the kids who’d been waiting for us had company, and as the crowd got bigger, it got restless. People closed in, standing right behind H, baiting him, cracking themselves up with their own lame remarks.

  “What?” someone I’d never seen before asked. “It doesn’t work like on TV?” Lots of kids laughed.

  “No wonder the crime rate in this town is so low.” That was a girl I sort of knew from U.S. history. More laughter, more people crowding in on the house.

  “Are we loitering?” That was the girl’s boyfriend, or at least someone she didn’t mind crushing her in the leather armpit of his bomber jacket. The two of them were joined at the hip. They even held their cigarettes in opposite hands, so they could take drags and hug at the same time.

  H ignored everyone around him and kept trying to j
immy the lock.

  “Three to the left.” A big kid, almost as broad as Span, and a lot taller, stepped out of the crowd to look over H’s shoulder. “Forty-four to the right, then break the mutha down.”

  It was pretty clear by now that H’s low-profile B and E wasn’t going to happen. And it was also clear that if somebody didn’t do something fast, the breaking and entering would be a lot messier than we’d planned. For one heartbeat, one dumb in-your-dreams second, I hoped Fry would call a halt to the whole bash. That he’d tell everybody to give it up and go home. But of course, he didn’t.

  What he did was grab H’s arm just as his friend had dropped the hanger and was about to take Smart-Mouth’s advice about breaking down the door. “C’mon, man,” he said. “Let’s do this the easy way. Sarah, what’s out back?”

  One part of me led the two of them around behind the cottage, while the other part, the part that sometimes dreamed of living inside with the Great One and his family, wanted to turn around and run from the scene of our crime. But Fry had taken my hand now, and the warm feeling was spreading right to my heart. I couldn’t hear a single thing over all that happy thumping. Stay.

  When I stopped in front of my favorite window, the one by Rufus Baylor’s desk, the make-believe me who lived in the cottage got very quiet. She shrank, too. She turned as tiny as a dollhouse daughter, a girl with bendable arms and legs. And no voice at all.

  Fry peered in the window with me. “Remember this, H?” he asked.

  H said nothing, just stood back to case the joint, hands on hips.

  “That tour lady said Baylor liked to write by this window, she said he loved the view.” Fry grinned at me, as if I had all the answers. “Maybe he left it unlocked, huh?”

  If I’d known they were going to break it, I would have tried to stop them. But it happened so fast: One minute H was grunting and pushing his pencil-thin shoulders against the window frame, trying to lift it up. The next minute, Fry told him to hold his coat across the bottom pane and then kicked it, karate-style, with his foot. The glass shattered as easily as an eggshell, and no one got hurt.