The Language of Stars

by Louise Hawes

  Which is why the first week of vacation also started with a fight. “Are you serious?” I couldn’t believe how charged-up he sounded, how excited about “getting one over on the Man.”

  “The Man?!” Wasn’t the bash enough? Did he really want to flirt with breaking more laws? “You mean the kids who work at the theater?” I asked. “Are they the Man?” And yes, I guess I put my hands on my hips and sounded like my own mother. “The ones who pop popcorn and check tickets? Who would lose their jobs if everyone did what you want to do?”

  “Oh, come on, Sarah.” Fry seemed truly perplexed. “Loosen up and get real. Those seats we’ll fill in the middle of the day?” He got that patient, oh-so-tolerant look, as if he were explaining things to a very slow two-year-old. “Those seats would just go empty if we didn’t do our hometown theater the favor of sneaking in.” He turned to H, who, to no one’s surprise, was starting his vacation with us and who liked action films as much as Fry. “Not to mention the extra popcorn they’ll sell once we’re into the second and third flicks, right?”

  H smiled. The way he was supposed to. The same way he agreed on cue, fetched on command, and nodded yes every chance he got. Me? I stood on line three times to buy three tickets, then ended up sitting in between two movie hoppers, wondering if I was doing the wrong thing or the right thing by sharing the giant popcorn and king-size cherry Twizzlers they’d bought. One moral dilemma I was spared was whether or not to kiss the good-looking movie hopper on my left. His accomplice on my right was so busy explaining the film to me, I never had the chance! “He’s not going to go with them,” H would whisper. Or, “Don’t worry, they don’t die; I’ve seen this three times.”

  I’m not sure how many more movie marathons I could have endured, but fortunately, we’ll never know—because after two days, the weather finally turned warmer and brighter. So we actually had one long beach day, one toasty, sun-dipped morning and afternoon, before it was time for poetry school again. Good as his word, though, Fry insisted he wasn’t going. He refused to join what he called the “Baylor Cult.”

  The same way he refused my offer of SPF 30 and flew over the surf, a gorgeous, unprotected sun god, on his board. The look he wore on his face when he came out of those waves was hard not to love—he was so full of happiness, it lit him up from inside. So what if he didn’t want to go to poetry school? So what if he refused to pay for movies no one else would sit through, anyway? Who could stay mad with Mr. Cool sprawled across half (okay, two-thirds) of your beach towel, his long legs pressed all along your shorter ones? Who wouldn’t forget about badly filmed car chases and lousy do-or-die dialogue when his fingers found just the right places on your neck and your shoulder and your . . . ?

  But no matter how many times I said I really, really wanted him to come to class; no matter how often I told him other kids all over the country would give anything to meet Rufus Baylor in person, Fry said no. And he kept saying no after the beach, too. Right through the video games he invited H and me to play. And right through H’s own version of my scolding-mother routine.

  “You’ll just have to make it up, man,” his friend warned Fry. “You can’t cut like at school. This one’s court-ordered.”

  “I told you,” Fry insisted. “I’ve watched the old guy, and he never takes roll. Neither does the Boy Scout.” In between his turns at Galactic Graveyard, he was working out, and his barbell was packed with extra weights. He grunted with every word, and frankly? I was glad I had something good to look at, because what I was hearing didn’t make sense at all.

  “This whole poetry-school thing?” GRUNT. “It’s a farce. Just a chance for Whale Point to get itself on the map.” GRUNT. “You two can go all runny every time that geezer opens his mouth. But me?” GRUNT. “No thanks on the Kool-Aid.”

  I’d never seen Fry afraid of anything. Still, that’s the way he was treating poetry—like a visit to the dentist or a math final. “Hey,” he told us, easing off the bench now that I’d blown my ship and all my crew to smithereens, “feeling isn’t something I need to do in a group, okay? I can do that fine all by myself.” He pulled me close, gave me a high-intensity grin. “Or with a significant other.”

  H, who had drawn the Fosdick card, threw the slobber-coated bone across the room. “Are you sure, man?” he asked. “We’ve got plenty of good times coming now that school’s out.” He studied the carpet, Fosdick’s bony, retreating rear end, everything but his friend’s face. “I mean, we owe the guy, don’t we? Why make him look bad?”

  “It’s true,” I said. “If you cut this class, everyone else will start cutting, too.” Just because kids were going along with some of Baylor’s exercises, and just because they weren’t acting out the way they usually did for subs, didn’t mean they’d all turned into poetry lovers. It didn’t mean that, if they thought they could get away with it, they wouldn’t bail on his classes.

  Fry turned down the volume, then reached for the console. “How come it’s my job to keep this old guy’s boat afloat?” He sounded angry, but he was piloting his spaceship effortlessly through the same asteroid field where I’d met my untimely end just a few seconds ago. “Excuse me if I choose not to watch you hang on that antique’s every word.” A meaningful glance at me. Which I met, head-on.

  “Wait a minute,” I told him. “The man talks sense and poetry, Fry. You’ve heard him.” I looked at H for support. “Why shouldn’t I listen to him?”

  “Sarah’s right.” H had accepted the squeaky toy from Fosdick again, but he held on to it. “I mean, who doesn’t want to learn from the best?”

  Alarms should have gone off. Confetti should have rained down and doves taken to the sky. Balloons, too. All glittery Mylar, with giant letters across their puffy faces: OMG!!! But even though none of that happened, a miracle had: For the first time since I’d known him, H had actually backed me up. He’d crossed, however timidly, the line between “Yes, sir” and “No, sir.” He had disagreed with Fry.

  I think Fry was as surprised as I was, because no one said anything, and H’s last sentence just sort of hung there in the silence. Who doesn’t want to learn from the best? Only Fosdick moved, backing away from H, begging him to throw the bone again. When he finally did, it was like the spell was broken, and Fry laughed.

  “Okay, Mr. and Mrs. Poetry, go do your thing. But while you’re writing about life, I’ll be living it . . . on the beach.” He turned up the game again.

  H and I grinned at each other, two rebels who’d gotten off easy. In that moment, I saw a side of H I’d never known was there, a part of him that didn’t care about being cool or playing second-in-command. I kind of liked it.

  But the two of us didn’t push our advantage. We stopped talking poetry, and spent the rest of our time at Fry’s incubating a trip to the water park, wondering where H had lost his cell phone, and discussing next weekend’s cleanup, which last topic devolved into a long, supremely boring debate about the best way to lay shingles.

  ME

  Did you see the job we did on those monster hedges?

  H

  Lifting that last row just weakens the shingles, man.

  FRY

  It’s the only way to make them watertight. Trust me.

  VIDEO GAME

  PSwatttTTTT! INTRUDER DETONATED!

  FOSDICK

  WR-AWWER-RRRR?

  ME

  I hope they make the sandwiches bigger next time, don’t you?

  FOSDICK

  HHHH-HHH-HHHHAAAAAWWWW.

  FRY

  Besides, if you don’t layer them, you’ll just have to reroof.

  VIDEO GAME

  PHHSSSHHHTTTTT! DO NOT RESIST!

  It wasn’t until we were getting ready to leave that someone mentioned poetry again. And that someone was me. Fry had walked us out to H’s car, where, of course, H found his cell wedged in the front seat. Our host leaned into the passenger window. “Are we okay?” He asked me like he wasn’t sure. Which made me feel like a princess.

&n
bsp; I put my hand on his. “It’s just I wish you wouldn’t treat this like a joke.”

  “Treat what like a joke?”

  “The bash,” I told him. “Rufus Baylor. Poetry.”

  “Just give me tomorrow off. You can tell everyone I’m one step from expiring.”

  “On the beach,” I added, only half smiling. I knew how much the chance for good waves meant to him, but I also knew that where Fry went, the rest of the class would follow. “And after that?”

  He stood away from the window, put his hand on his chest. “I hereby officially promise to take all that stuff seriously.” I couldn’t help thinking of the six-year-old he’d let show last week, the one who’d nursed a black-and-blue mark on his wrist.

  “Prove it,” I said, smiling up at him for real now. Did he remember the way he’d challenged me to read the play that last night of rehearsals? If he did, he didn’t show it, he just smiled back. “Write a poem.”

  “What?!” A laugh as if I’d asked him to swim the Channel or launch himself into outer space.

  “Write a poem,” I said again. I glanced at H, who was checking messages on his lost-and-found phone. “Just for me,” I whispered now. “A poem just for me.”

  The Third Class

  It was just H and me on the drive to Baylor’s next class. It felt strange to be going somewhere without Fry. As if Costello had suddenly decided to make a movie without Abbott. Where was the handsome straight guy when you needed him?

  We were halfway to campus when my cell vibrated and I clicked on the new text message. It was from Fry, and I shivered when I read what he’d written. It was a POEM! A good one, an amazing one, so real and so full of feeling I nearly burst out crying right in front of H. There, in a few words on the backlit screen of my phone, was everything I’d hoped to hear my boyfriend say. Fry’s poem was nothing like the rhyming monster he and H had concocted at the beach. It was strong and true and filled me up like a meal I’d always dreamed of but never tasted.

  I read that poem over and over during the rest of the ride to the college. I kept stealing glances at my cell, and H must have thought I hadn’t checked my messages all day. Long loved, held dear past count. I wanted to yell, to laugh, to share the poem with H. But somehow what Fry had written felt private, like a sweet secret between us. So instead, I sat and smiled dumbly through H’s chatter, nodding at places I hoped it made sense, looking at my phone when I could. All the time, bubbling like a happy stream underneath, were those beautiful words. Tear-swamped, fallen. And the knowledge that I hadn’t made it all up. That Fry really cared for me. Truly and more deeply than I’d ever imagined.

  Only the man who’d stood up to my father, the wonder worker who’d turned H into a poetry reader, could have made me put my phone away when we got to class. As it was, I’d already memorized most of Fry’s poem, so even while Rufus talked, even while I turned in my own homework, I kept saying Fry’s words over to myself, as if I were fingering  jewels in my pocket. No one could see them, but I knew they were there: Beloved. Tender. Sigh-filled.

  Our poet told us we wouldn’t be going outside, since he didn’t want us sidetracked, that we had serious work to do. Shy. Lovely. Lost. It was already getting hot without the AC, and I guessed with no Fry Man to corral them, the herd might grow restless. One of Thatcher’s friends leaned across the aisle and put his arm around H. “Where’s the man?” he asked.

  Before H could answer, I leaned in between them. “Fry’s really sick,” I said, playing the distraught girlfriend. No elaborate script required, just a worried look and a hushed whisper. “He asked me to take notes.” I threw that last line in, and it may have been a little too much. The kid did a double take, but fortunately our poet had finished collecting homework and was passing out something that distracted us all.

  They were sleep masks! He told us we’d probably had our fill of looking deep. “Now, it’s time to smell deep,” he said. “And taste deep.” He put a black silky mask on every desk in the room, even the prof’s. They had elastic straps like the ones Hollywood stars wore to bed in old movies. “Go on,” Baylor urged us. “Put them on.” He was grinning, and those eyes of his were keeping secrets.

  That was the last thing I saw, our poet’s eyes, before I couldn’t see anything at all. Underneath my mask, though, I kept secrets of my own. Fairest. Dancing. Soft.

  “Tight enough?” Rufus touched the back of my head, and I nodded in the dark. He slipped something into my hand, then moved on. He must have checked everyone’s blindfolds, handed them all a little paper-wrapped package like mine. I heard him walking up and down the rows of desks, asking the same question.

  It was candy. It had to be, I could already smell it.

  “Okay,” Rufus told us. “Unwrap ’em and start sniffing.” I could hear his smile, even if I couldn’t see it. “No tasting, mind. Right now, we’re just inhaling, not ingesting.”

  I unwrapped a hard, round ball, put it close to my nose. Right away, I was breathing in a strong, bracing lemony smell, like the curls Chef Manny taught me to fold into roses and put on the glazed pork. I put Fry’s jewel words back in my pocket and listened.

  “The nose,” our poet told us, “is a much maligned but truly magnificent instrument.” He stopped, walked over to someone’s desk, I couldn’t tell whose. “No peeking,” he warned. There was a shuffling sound, then an embarrassed laugh I recognized right away. It was Dr. Fenshaw. Cheating like a little kid.

  “When folks say someone’s nosy, they don’t usually mean it as a compliment,” Rufus went on. “But I want y’all to be nosy, and yes, I want you to rub your noses in it.”

  I took another whiff of my candy. It was small, but it packed a wallop. I felt both my nasal passages clear, and then a memory swamped me, and I was suddenly in the kitchen of our old house and Mom had just asked me to help her slice the lemons for lemonade. What a disaster that turned out to be.

  “Marcel Proust, a famous French writer, knew smells and tastes hook us right up to memory. One whiff of the right aroma, and we step back in time.”

  Had Baylor read my mind? I smiled even more, because if he had, he already knew I couldn’t make a poem out of what happened that day—me cutting myself with the knife, Mom screeching at all the blood, and the emergency-room nurse trying to calm her down. . . .

  “Now in Proust’s case, it was a cookie that got him remembering, thinking about his childhood. But I checked the bakery in town here, and I couldn’t find the kind Proust ate.” There was a crinkling sound, and I guessed our poet was putting the bag of candies away. “You know the little shop I mean? Right next to the library?”

  We did. The Carousel was the only bakery in Whale Point. Unless you counted the one at the supermarket, which no one much did. Birthdays? Graduations? Promotions? They all called for one of the Carousel’s triple-layers with meringue filling. They were expensive and Mom hated that you had to keep them refrigerated, but they were definitely worth it.

  “Proust’s madeleines were big and soft, almost like small cakes. But the only thing they had at the bakery today were those flat silver-dollar cookies my mama used to call sandies.”

  Rufus’s voice changed now, and there was a soft, syrupy sound to his words. Was he sucking on a candy of his own? “I tasted one, but it just didn’t tickle my nose. Which is why I settled on these hard candies.” He paused, sucked. “Like the way they smell?”

  There was a sort of murmuring, a few more crinkling sounds, and yes, lots of illegal slurping. I guess that satisfied him, because he kept going. “I see some of you have already graduated from sniffing to licking.” He chuckled and slurped some more himself. “Go on, then. After you’ve sniffed your fill, start tasting. Tasting is ninety-nine percent smell, anyway, and it’ll keep the good times rolling.”

  It was like the flowers in the garden all over again. A bunch of high school kids, a handful of suckers, and not a peep. “No chewing,” he cautioned us. “Just hold the taste in your mouths, and let the memories com
e.”

  So we sat there, listening in the quiet to our own lips and tongues at work. We let the candy melt in our mouths, and remembered. Or at least, I did. I don’t know why it worked, but it did. I was a little girl again, before my mother dreamed of med school, before I met Fry, before whisper, wondrous, wide. I wasn’t sure how much time had passed when Baylor spoke. But when he did, it wasn’t like an interruption at all. It was like that slow drawl of his slipped right into the pictures in my mind.

  “So,” he said, “what y’all got? Who remembered something they want to share?”

  I couldn’t see how many hands went up, but I knew H raised his because he was sitting right next to me. And because he made such a production out of it, banging his desk and muttering under his breath.

  Mr. Desperate for the Limelight got his way, and I heard Rufus walk over to our row. “Mr. Losada,” he said. “Of the poem that’s still growing! Let’s hear where you went.”

  “Not anywhere I wanted to, sir.” H’s voice sounded different when I couldn’t see him, older, deeper. “Not at first, anyway.”

  Rufus Baylor’s voice changed now too, shifted to something softer, more intimate as he leaned over H’s desk. “What’s your flavor, Hector?”

  “Coffee,” H told him. “This is definitely coffee. I know, even though I haven’t tasted it since I was little.”

  “Hmmm.” I could hear Baylor’s smile. “So you’re not a fan of my must-have beverage, eh?”

  “No, sir,” H told him. “I was eight the last time I drank coffee. It was the day my mom caught me smoking in my room.” He stopped, waiting for us to go there. “I made sure to open the window, but I guess I was quiet for too long.”