The Language of Stars

by Louise Hawes

  To be honest? I suppose my mother wasn’t the only one who was ashamed. Once the papers came out, I felt more cut off from my old friends than ever. For all I knew, they still called themselves the Untouchables. But it was me who felt like one. When I passed George or Wanda in the hall, I looked away. When I saw Wanda’s number on my cell phone, I didn’t even concoct an excuse not to call back. I just erased it. I was sure, you see, what she and the rest of them were thinking; I was certain they’d filed me under L for “Lost Cause.” D for “Degenerate.” Or T for “Terminator of Poetry, Art, Friendship, and All Things Sacred.”

  The judgment that mattered, of course, came at the trial, which was over in a single day. The judge told us the same thing the sergeant had, that we were too young to go to jail. But she said she wanted us to understand what we’d done. She talked about how Rufus H. Baylor was an institution. How we should respect the way he loved our state, the gifts he’d given us all. Then she sentenced us to clean up the cottage we’d nearly burned to the ground. And to take a course in Baylor’s poetry at the community college. That last part surprised everyone, and except for the judge and maybe the college prof who was supposed to teach the course, it didn’t make anybody happy.

  People in town? They thought we deserved way worse. The Watch printed a whole new series of letters to the editor, most of them insisting we should do community work, hang in effigy, or spend the rest of our lives with red letters on our chests. And in case you think I’m exaggerating, one writer actually suggested we wear armbands “so everyone will know these kids for the lowlifes they are.”

  So I suppose you could say we got off easy. Or some of us did. I don’t know how many other parents decided they needed to go the court one better, but my mother couldn’t leave bad enough alone. She decided I needed to learn what I’d put at risk that night, and sentenced me to an endless and hideously boring lecture series at the library. It was called Women in Medicine, and it was only slightly preferable to being grounded for the rest of my life. Which, Mom made clear, was the alternative.

  In the end, then, none of us had to wear armbands or paint park benches. But if we didn’t do hard time, our way out and up wasn’t exactly a get-out-of-jail-free card, either. Even Fry and H, whose parents didn’t pile more punishments on top of the court’s, were still saddled with summer poetry school. And given how they felt about school of any kind, maybe that was enough.

  Me? When I wasn’t enduring Shepherd’s jokes about juvenile delinquents or watching the less-than-enthralling cinematic reenactment of the first surgery performed by a female physician, I kind of looked forward to learning more about Nella’s father. I knew that, under different circumstances, my old nerdy friends would probably be jealous of my chance to study Baylor’s poems with an expert. And then, just a few days after the sentencing, I decided they’d probably want to trade places with me, even if they had to wear armbands to do it. Because that’s when we found out the Great One had decided to teach the course himself!

  Things Take a Poetic Turn

  POETIC JUSTICE FOR WAYWARD TEENS. That was the headline. RENOWNED POET TO TEACH DELINQUENTS. And there he was, Rufus H. Baylor himself, in a blurry photo right underneath. His eyes were narrowed to slits and his mouth was open in what could have been a smile but was more likely, given his age, a grin-and-bear-it stab of arthritis, lumbago, or whatever senior citizens get. Smiling or not, though, that photo and the announcement that came with it were the beginning of our little town feeling like a very big deal.

  No one could figure out why a world-famous celebrity had volunteered to teach us himself. The mayor and town council were sure it was fond memories that were bringing him back. They said so in as many interviews and articles as they could. (Their speeches were definitely written by the same person who’d boasted, in the plaque at the cottage, about “picturesque streets and friendly residents.”)

  My personal theory was that Baylor had simply gotten tired of being an institution. Of being filed away in encyclopedias and anthologies and left to die. In fact, after listening to the way my teachers, the judge, and the newspapers all talked about him, I decided the Great One and I might have something in common: Nobody needed him, either.

  Baylor’s problem wasn’t getting born, of course; it was hanging around too long afterward. His poems, the really big ones, had all been written decades ago. He’d been invited to read one at the White House a few years ago, but he’d lost his glasses and stumbled over the lines. That’s when the world decided he was too old to count, and more or less forgot about him.

  Fry thought I was right. “The guy’s gotta be bored. And helping us sure beats working puzzles at the old folks’ home.” But that was the end of Fry’s empathy. Mostly, he wanted nothing to do with Baylor. And H, no surprise there, felt the same way. Which, of course, was not at all how the good residents of Whale Point reacted. Yes, there were more letters to the editor, this time praising the Great One, his charity, his generosity, his ability to forgive. And the chamber of commerce? Let’s just say they appreciated the timing of Baylor’s gesture, which would focus national attention on our town just as the summer season got under way. Like sunscreen and beach towels, WELCOME, RUFUS BAYLOR signs and “poetry specials” began cropping up everywhere. Even at the supermarket.

  I’m sorry to say that my prince had learned very little about the perils of buying alcohol before you reach drinking age. Even though I’d switched to ginger ale (under threat of eternal grounding), Fry and H were determined to stock up on beer. As soon as Span got home from college for the summer, H drove us all to Save More, and while the three of them debated the merits of lager versus ale, I cruised the snack aisle. I was halfway down when a large, handwritten shelf sign caught my eye: “THE SKY LIKE CHIPS OF SAPPHIRE, THE WATER DIPPED IN DARK.” CHIPS AND DIPS AT POETIC PRICES!

  But when I went back to get the others, to ask them to come see the sign, Span just smiled and pointed to another one over the wine rack: “EVERY VINTAGE BRINGS ITS HARVEST, AND THIS YEAR WE’VE REAPED JOY.” LYRICAL WINES AT PROFOUND DISCOUNTS! Clearly, Whale Point’s biggest supermarket had a poetry fan among its employees. Specifically, a Rufus Baylor fan, since those quoted lines, it turned out, were all from our visiting poet’s work. Before we left, we read more verse in nearly every aisle, so we weren’t surprised when the cashier told us (after squinting at Span’s ID for what seemed like an eternity) that the assistant store manager was a major poetry buff, and that he’d matched up products and poems all over the store.

  And there were other Baylor groupies, too. The Oceanside Motel was already advertising “Laureate Suites.” The local radio station read sponsored poems instead of ads. And everyone, from the clerks in stores to the staff in restaurants to the policeman who directed traffic where a signal had gone dark, was wearing yellow buttons: WELCOME TO WHALE POINT, THE SUMMER OF POETRY.

  “What is the big deal?” Fry was not the least bit impressed. In fact, he sounded outraged. “So the guy can rhyme. So what?”

  “Well, for one, his rhymes are beyond famous.” Span grinned at my prince and me from the passenger seat. “As in, world famous. Hell, I’d like to meet him, just to tell the kids at school I shook his hand, you know?”

  “Maybe I can help you out with that big dream, Spano.” Fry was not smiling back. “How about you go to class for me? And I’ll stay home for you?”

  I was surprised at how angry he was, how . . . well, almost jealous. And his mood didn’t improve even after H and Span dropped us off at his house. Of course, that may have been because (a) his mother was home, so (b) we didn’t have the place to ourselves, which meant (c) he couldn’t try to talk me out of my underwear. Plus, (d) that was the day the letter came from court.

  When she handed him the envelope, Fry’s mother wore this sorry, shamed expression—as if it were her fault we were going to summer school. Fry took one look at the return address and groaned, then passed the letter on to me. After I made small talk with Mrs. Reynolds (sh
e liked my sweater, I liked the smell of whatever she had in the oven), Fry and I took our bad news into the den. We had to ramp up the volume on the TV so his mom wouldn’t hear what we were saying. She was a friendly woman, who told me she’d always wanted a daughter and apologized every time I visited for the dog hair on the couch. But she was also one of the chattiest people I’d ever met, so Fry and I usually ended up excusing ourselves and telling her we had homework to do. Which meant we had to whisper if we wanted to talk about anything besides constitutional amendments or logarithms.

  The letter said our first cleanup was scheduled in two weeks, and that poetry classes would start before that, in less than a week. Fry, who loved working with cars and was always fixing things around the house for his mother, didn’t seem to mind the idea of the cleanup. But he was still having trouble cultivating the appropriate attitude for poetry school.

  “Screw this!” he said when I read him the dates. “I’ve got driver’s ed on Thursdays.” He reached for the letter, double-checked the class day, then threw it onto a pile of papers and magazines by the TV. There was a movie on, but we weren’t really watching it.

  Even though Fry had turned the volume up, I tried to whisper. If I could hear Mrs. Reynolds chopping in the kitchen, why couldn’t she hear me talking in the den? “Baylor doesn’t have to do this, you know,” I told Fry. “He could stay in Asheville and rest on his laurels.”

  “His what?”

  Once in a while, I forgot myself and talked to Fry like he was one of my old nerdy friends. “Put yourself in his place,” I told him. “If you were very old and very famous, would you make a special trip to teach us the error of our ways?” I pulled that week’s Watch, along with Fearless Fosdick’s rubber dog bone, from under the couch cushion. (I was getting tired of crinkling and squeaking every time I moved.) I threw the bone into the middle of the room and watched Fry’s ancient setter amble toward it.

  “I’d feel a whole lot better if everyone who played paid, that’s all.” Fry nodded at his dog, who had reached the bone and was looking back, as if to check with us before he picked it up.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “I mean there were plenty of kids at that party who never made it to court.” Fry held out his hands for the slobbery trophy Fosdick carried back. “Money talks.” He shook his head. “And pigeons fly.”

  “Huh?”

  “Look. If the cops offered you a chance to walk, wouldn’t you give them names?”

  I wasn’t sure how these things worked. I stared at the TV, where people were lined up, waving their arms and singing. Could you plea-bargain your way out of being drunk and teenage? “I most certainly would not!” I was taking the moral high ground here. Of course, no one had offered me an alternative. And what if I didn’t go to Whale Point? What if I recognized some of the kids at the bash, but didn’t really know them? Didn’t care?

  And then I was back at the cottage. And he was beside me again, the tall, lanky kid from Mamselle’s. He was trying to give Nella a drink, and his face was a mask. He didn’t look angry, but he didn’t look like he was having fun, either. He just had it in for pretty girls, pretty girls who probably wouldn’t even talk to him unless they were drunk. She looks thirsty, dontcha think?

  When Fry put his arm around me, I didn’t respond. “Earth to Sar.” My prince wasn’t used to chilly princesses. “What’s up? Where’d you go?”

  “There was this boy at the bash,” I told him, easing out of flashback mode, turning in his arms. “My dad fired him from the restaurant.”

  “And?”

  “And maybe he called the police?”

  Fry nodded. “Come to think of it,” he told me, “there were plenty of people there with their attitudes on wrong.” He was smiling. Finally. “Including three girls I’ve broken up with.” Pulling me close. “Three girls who’d love to be where you are right now.” He ran his tongue along the crease between my ear and my cheek. I’m not sure whether I shivered because it felt so good. Or because Mrs. Reynolds’s blender had stopped and someone on TV was suddenly singing very loudly. I sat up straight and proper, nodded toward the kitchen. I grabbed the dog toy from Fry’s lap and threw it to Fosdick for cover.

  But the blender started up again and Fry moved on. “Hey,” he said, throwing himself into a new scheme, “maybe we can get the old fart to teach us poetry and parking.” He was still not happy about missing the only course he was likely to pass without cracking a book. “That way, we’d actually learn something we can use.”

  “I don’t think Baylor drives anymore,” I told him. The woman on TV was singing from the deck of a sinking ship. I ignored her, remembering parallel parking. Shepherd had tried to teach me once after he’d driven me home. Once was enough:

  FEARLESS FOSDICK

  Fhluuuumph, stchuuuumph, chuuuumph.

  RUBBER BONE

  WhhhhEET. WhhhEEEET.

  SHEPHERD

  (In my head)

  Turn the lousy wheel, for Chrissake!

  WOMAN ON TV

  (Singing)

  I’ll never give up, up, up! This won’t get me down, down, down!

  FRY’S MOM’S BLENDER

  CHRRRRRRRRR . . . CHRRRRRRRR . . . CHRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR.

  SHEPHERD

  (In my head, louder)

  I said “sharp”! Are you freakin’ deaf?

  I was doing it again. Tuning in to the crazy, busy dialogue that filled up every day, like a script that never ended. But Fosdick decided it was time I quit listening and started throwing again. He looked up at me, huge eyes pooled with dog tears, then laid his squeaky toy, coated with drool, in my lap. As Aunt Jocelyn used to say when things in the refrigerator collected mold, Quadruple yuck!

  Fry stroked his old dog’s head, a reward Fosdick probably figured he’d earned for leaving that slime trail on my jeans. He waited for more pats, but Fry was focused on Baylor, instead, and on dissing poets, poetry, and words in general. “Writing seems like not living to me.” He got all flushed and worked up when he was on a riff. It made him seem deep and sensitive. So I didn’t mind that he was talking complete trash. I mean, he’d never written a poem in his life.

  “It’s worse than wanking.” Fry grabbed the newspaper from between us and tossed it toward the paper pile. “That’s at least doing something.”

  “Shhhhh!” I couldn’t believe Fry was talking like this only one room away from his mother, blender or no blender. The Watch had fallen short, landing to one side of Fry’s weight bench, and the page with the Great One’s picture had spilled out. The way it landed, the poet was standing on that white head of his. “If he’s too old to drive,” I whispered to Fry, “he’s too old for that stuff, too.” I didn’t want him making fun of someone he didn’t even know. Someone who’d roasted marshmallows with Nella. “Miss Kinney says he’s over eighty.”

  Fry processed that factoid from our English teacher, something he’d obviously missed, probably due to an incoming text. (He could blind text, and since he hid his cell in his hoodie or a binder, even I couldn’t always tell when he was using it.) Now he seemed genuinely stunned that anyone, anywhere, could live as long as Baylor had. “I don’t want to get that old,” he said. “Ever. I’d rather go out with all my engines revved full speed.”

  “I hope he’s got some family around.” I let Fry take my hand now, because the couch had stopped squeaking and I could hear his mom’s blender purring like a lawn mower. “I mean, who’s glad he’s alive? Who really cares?”

  “Not me, that’s for sure.” Fry leveled a laser death-beam at the Watch, which stubbornly refused to disintegrate. “There must be a thousand celebrities I’d rather get the chance to meet.

  “On the other hand,” he said, pulling me close, “let’s look on the bright side. If he’s as old as Miss Kinney says, he might croak before the class starts.”

  “They’d just find someone else to take his place.” I pushed his hands away from places I knew Mrs. R. wouldn’t want to fin
d them, then snuggled against his chest. “Some runner-up poet.” I could feel Fry’s heart pump against my cheek. Stay.

  “Yeah,” he admitted. “At least we’ll get bored by the best, Mr. Big League himself: ‘You are my dear compass.’ Gag me with ten spoons!”

  “What?” If I separated the words from Fry’s sarcasm, they felt pretty good. I sat up, turned his face toward me. “Say that again.”

  “Where were you? Kinney spent half of last class talking about that one.” A frown at the memory. “Then kept us past the bell so she could recite it.”

  “Don’t you remember?” I asked him. “I wasn’t there.” Nothing’s free, that’s what Shepherd always says, and although I hated to admit it, I guessed he was right. I mean, leaving school early for Women in Medicine was a small price to pay for my mother not grounding me until I was ninety. But it turned out, I’d missed more than clock-watching. Apparently, Miss Kinney was using the end of class to read her favorites.

  “I can tell she knows all his stuff by heart,” Fry explained. “She closes her eyes through almost every line.” He leaned across me on the couch, and for a minute I thought I was going to have to fight him off again. But then he dug our English book out from behind the cushions, and suddenly he was doing something I’d never dreamed of, even in my most far-fetched Cinderella and Prince Fry fantasies—he was reading me poetry!

  He thumbed through the book and found the page he wanted. Then he put one hand across his chest, and spoke so high I wondered if he’d break something. “You are my dear compass, / who knows no way but true,” he said in a pathetic imitation of our English teacher’s voice. “So when I’m lost and drifting, / I find myself in you.”

  In spite of his hideous delivery, I loved the sound of what he’d read. The sound and the meaning, too. “I like it,” I said, hoping I wouldn’t scare him off, hoping he’d read more. “It feels like it’s about two people in love. They don’t even need to talk, just look at each other.”