Steering the Stars

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Steering the Stars Page 7

by Doughton, Autumn


  “Do I even want to know what happened back there?” he asked as we walked up to the register.

  I gave an emphatic shake of my head. “No.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  On the drive back, Henry explained that he was taking a carpentry class this semester. “I’m learning my way around power tools,” he explained as he turned the car onto my street. “So fixing the lock is going to be no problem.”

  “I’m not worried,” I assured him.

  By the time we reached my house, the sun was setting. The storm was long gone and the late afternoon sky was purplish and laced with thick, dusty golden clouds.

  After some discussion about placement, Henry and I positioned the lock in a new spot and measured out the holes for the bolts.

  “Do you have the drill?”

  “Yeah,” I said, passing it forward. I’d grabbed it from my dad’s supply of backup tools and had already fitted it with the right bit to make the holes for the bolts.

  Henry leaned over the fence post. In the diffused light, his hair looked even lighter than usual, like ripened wheat. His face was strained in concentration. I watched him depress the trigger on the drill and—

  “What the hell?”

  I examined the drill. “It’s on the wrong setting.”

  He shook his head. “What?”

  “Here,” I offered, moving in so that our bodies were touching along one side. I pointed to the black button on the side of the drill. “You have to make sure the direction is going the right way or it won’t work properly. It was on reverse.”

  Henry looked at me like I’d sprouted elephant ears.

  “What?” I asked, feeling my cheeks heat.

  “You do know tools.”

  “Don’t look so shocked. Just try it again and I’ll supervise.”

  “And you promise not to tell anyone that you needed to help me use a power tool? Because I’d never live that down.”

  I put a hand to my chest. “I wouldn’t dare.”

  He laughed.

  When the project was done, Henry stayed to watch Aspen play in the yard. Eventually, though, the streetlamps kicked on out front and we both knew it was time to call it a night.

  “I gotta get going,” he said.

  “Yeah—me too. I have to get dinner started for my dad and me. He’ll be home any minute so we can eat.”

  That was only a half-truth. It was true that I usually made dinner, but my father and I hadn’t actually eaten a meal together in years. Most of the time, I just left him a plate on the counter covered in foil and ate by myself in my room watching movies or doing my homework.

  But I didn’t want Henry to know all that, so I made a point to keep my voice upbeat.

  “Okay, well…” he said as he started walking toward where his car was parked in the drive. “This was good.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed.

  “You sound almost surprised.”

  “No, I was just thinking that school sucked with Hannah being gone, and the whole mess up with my schedule, and finding out I have to participate in a musical to pass a class, and then Aspen getting out,” I rambled things off. “But you’re right—this was good.”

  He grinned. “And tomorrow will be better.”

  I shrugged. “Maybe.

  “Just stay away from any geriatrics on scooters and you’ll be fine,” he said, opening his car door.

  “But, I thought…” I was taken aback. “You saw that?”

  Henry made a what-do-I-look-like face. “Of course I did. It was the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time.”

  When his car door slammed shut, I was both cringing and laughing.

  He was right.

  It was funny.

  I laughed so hard that I had to squeeze my arms around my stomach as I walked back toward the empty house. It was crazy that after such a horrible Hannah-less day I could feel so good.

  And that had everything to do with Henry.

  To: Hannah

  From: Caroline

  Date: September 6

  Subject: Postcard!

  Got your postcard! Loved it! I pinned it to the bulletin board over my bed.

  Did I tell you Miles, your super hot but stupid lab partner from last year, is the teacher’s aid for my theater class? But I don’t think he’s as bad as you thought. He’s actually kind of fun.

  xoxo

  ____________

  To: Owen

  From: Hannah

  Date: September 7

  Subject: Knock knock

  -Who’s there?

  -Cows go.

  -Cows go who?

  -Nope. Cows go mooooooo!

  Bad joke but you have to remember that I’m living with two little girls now and they LOVE knock knock jokes. They also love unicorns and rainbows and cats dressed in clothes. But, anywhooooo... WHY are you still ignoring me? For how long??? I’m not saying that I don’t deserve it but you can’t just ignore me forever.

  Hannah

  ____________

  To: Hannah

  From Henry

  Date: September 8

  Subject: Waz up

  Jellybean,

  How’s life? I heard through the grapevine that you broke some kid’s nose? Was it self-defense or you just didn’t like the looks of him?

  ____________

  To: Henry

  From: Hannah

  Date: September 9

  Subject: Re: Waz up

  Brother dearest,

  Now you know the truth. The real reason I moved to London was to hone my Krav Maga skills.

  I’m coming for you next...

  ____________

  Okay, I didn’t break his nose, but my racquet did leave a wicked bruise under his left eye that showed for the rest of the week.

  I learned the American boy’s name was Joel Sinclair and that he was in upper sixth, the year above me. In the States, that would have made him a senior.

  According to Ruben and Tillie, Joel had been a student at Warriner for over a year so I couldn’t understand why he didn’t seem to have any friends. There were rumors of course. First, I heard from someone “in the know” that he was a reformed drug dealer. Someone else said he was actually a politician’s son. Then there was the one about him being gay. Being some kind of juvenile delinquent. Having a mild form of Asperger’s.

  I figured most of it was a joke and the rest was exaggeration to the tenth power but that didn’t mean that I didn’t want to hear it. Joel was different. Interesting. In a room full of noisy, gossiping teenagers, he was the quiet one. That made him stand out, which in turn, made him the subject of speculation.

  He always carried a notebook with him, tucked under one arm or gripped tightly in his hand. Sometimes he wrote in it. Sometimes he drew. Sometimes he just stared down at a blank page like he was waiting for something to appear there. And maybe he was. I couldn’t be sure.

  What I was sure about was that I liked to watch him. I liked to watch him move through the halls between classes and dodge shots on the squash court. I liked to watch him in the cafeteria where, in classic loner style, he ate alone, preferring a pen and paper to human companionship.

  Joel Sinclair was odd. Mysterious. Artsy in a non-emo kind of way. I couldn’t quite explain it, but even wearing the exact same uniform as everyone else at Warriner, he seemed… out of place or something. Like he didn’t belong among us. Like his thoughts were sailing on a far, far away ocean and he wished he could join them.

  On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays we shared one class together—Theory and Practice of Fiction, which was pretty much a workshop where Mr. Hammond talked a lot about the voice, tone, and pacing of our writing. Then he’d assign us a word count and maybe a genre and we were expected to come up with something amazing to bring to the next class.
/>   More often than they should have, I found my eyes wandering to where Joel sat with his back to a window and his black hair framed by the dull sky.

  What was he thinking?

  I was mulling over this question during the second week of school when Mr. Hammond’s voice snapped me out of my reverie.

  “Now, what you’ve all been waiting for,” he boomed, moving between the rows of desks and passing out papers from a stack he carried. “It’s peer review time.”

  Even though I had a pretty good idea what was happening, I leaned toward Tillie’s desk and asked anyway, “What’s a peer review?”

  “I think he means he’s going to have us read each other’s stories.”

  Dread settled in my gut. Tillie must have noticed.

  “It will be fine,” she said quietly. “No one pays much attention to whose paper they get.”

  That felt like the kind of lie that a smiling dentist tells you before pulling out a needle and a torque wrench. You won’t feel a thing. Maybe just a little pinch.

  I was calling bullshit on all of it.

  Mr. Hammond reached my desk and handed me a piece of paper. “We’ll take ten minutes to read and another ten minutes to write comments,” were his instructions. “These are the writing prompts you worked on at the end of class on Monday.”

  What? My eyes darted around the class. I had stupidly assumed that Mr. Hammond was the only one who would be reading those stories and now, as I wondered who had my paper, a gnarled vine of dismay was wrapping itself around my lungs and squeezing.

  It’s not that what I’d written was inappropriate or too personal or anything like that. It was just… not good.

  Of course, the insanely obscure prompt hadn’t helped much.

  You are a tree.

  A tree? Really—what could I do with that?

  In the end, I’d scraped out five paragraphs of the beginning of a Lord of the Rings type fantasy, using a watchful tree as the narrator. It wasn’t until after I had turned in the paper that I remembered trees were stationary and my big adventure story was, quite literally, going nowhere.

  Hemingway I was not.

  Mr. Hammond paused at the front of the room. “When you’ve completed the critique, please bring it to my desk and I will return to you the short stories that you handed in last week.”

  Two rows over, Ava raised her hand.

  He pointed to her. “Miss Cameron?”

  “Are the short stories graded?”

  “Yes, they are. I wanted you to have some idea of how my grading system works before we get into the larger tasks.”

  Inwardly, I groaned. I was already struggling with the small exercises like the prompts and journaling he’d asked us to do. And I’d agonized for three days over that short story assignment—reworking a two-thousand-word detective story over and over until I thought my brain would break. A “meatier” task sounded light years beyond my abilities at this point.

  My lips felt sticky. I licked them and tried to focus on the story that was waiting on my desk but I got tripped up on the first line. More specifically, on a name written in even block letters.

  Joel Sinclair .

  Once I realized whose paper I was looking at, everything else shifted. My heart went thumpty thump. My throat went raw. The classroom noise faded to the recesses of my mind. I stopped worrying about who was looking at my story. I didn’t think about my grade in the class or about squash or how grey and rainy London was or about Owen or why my sister had barely spoken to me since she’d picked me up from the airport.

  I read.

  Then I read it again.

  Joel’s story started out simply enough and was just eleven paragraphs told from the perspective of a tree growing in a cemetery. Through the seasons, the tree watched an endless procession of graves being dug and people being buried. It saw grown men in dark suits cry. It witnessed a small child in a tiny overcoat leave a white rose on his sister’s casket. It stood silently by as lovers, co-workers, family, and sometimes enemies said their final goodbyes.

  Maybe all of this sounds morbid but it wasn’t. The arrangement and the words were lyrical—almost poetic. The vignettes were honest and poignant and by the end of class, I was sure of one thing: Joel Sinclair was a writer. A real one.

  I stayed at my desk until the rest of the students had finished and were already filing out of the classroom. Gripping Joel’s story, which I had only critiqued with generic suggestions like expand and interesting, I shuffled to Mr. Hammond’s desk. He was bent over writing something in the margin of a large grade book.

  “I’m done,” I said, holding out the paper. “Though I doubt my critique will be much help.”

  He looked up and when he saw me, he smiled. “Just set it down there and—” he rifled through an olive green file folder, “—here’s your short story. Hannah, I’d like to see you dig deeper next time.”

  Dig deeper? With trembling fingers, I flipped the paper over and saw the letter D. I gulped and squeezed my eyes shut.

  The grading system here was slightly different than in the US but a D was still a terrible grade. So much for trying to impress my teacher by joining the squash team.

  “I know you’re probably discouraged but I don’t want you to take one grade to heart. You have talent.”

  I scoffed.

  “You do,” he insisted. “But I need to see more of you in what you write.”

  I bit the inside of my cheek and shrugged—a gesture I couldn’t help. “What—I don’t understand what you mean.”

  “The essay you submitted for the contest?”

  My head bobbed uncertainly. “Uh-huh?”

  “I want more of that,” he said. “That’s the voice I’m looking for, Hannah. The one that got you into Warriner.”

  The essay had been about my life in Oklahoma. Looking back, it seemed juvenile and provincial and I couldn’t believe it had won a scholarship and my position here at Warriner.

  “But…” I shifted my weight awkwardly. “It was boring. There wasn’t even a plot.”

  He said nothing for a second. Then, “The library has several handbooks I think might be helpful. We don’t have practice today so you might want to use the opportunity to check them out...” I watched him open a desk drawer and pull out a blank notepad. He began writing author names and titles. “Do you remember what I said last week about the infinite possibilities inside the human heart?”

  It was fuzzy—something he’d said when someone in class referenced a poem by Lord Byron—but I nodded anyway.

  “In this class,” he continued, “I’m looking for an emphasis on emotion. Whether it’s horror, pain, or love. I want you to make me feel something, Hannah.”

  All I could come up with was, “Okay.”

  “The best advice I can give you is to write about the things you know.”

  Sure, that was a fine thing for someone to say.

  But what do you write about if you don’t know anything yet?

  ****

  Silence has its own sound. And that’s the sound—a low, hollow buzz—that filled my ears when I walked into the library that afternoon.

  Mr. Hammond had been right about at least one thing. I needed all the help I could get.

  Forget winning the Pulitzer or getting into a great college. With the way things were going I would be lucky to hang onto my spot at Warriner until the end of the term.

  I could just picture it. I’d be called into the office and seated in front of a panel of stern white-haired men in stiff grey suits. They would take one look at my work and tell me that this whole thing had been a big fat mistake.

  “What are you looking for?”

  I picked my head up and saw a student sitting behind the circulation desk. He must help out in the library for extra credit or something.

  “My teacher suggested I look for these,” I said, giving him the slip of paper with the titles Mr. Hammond had written down earlier.

  It didn’t take long to find the b
ooks or to locate an available study carrel in the deserted Maritime History section. There, I unpacked my backpack, plugged my earbuds in, and got to work. Thirty minutes turned into an hour and an hour turned into two. First, I scanned the writing manuals and took notes. When I got tired of that, I did a set of problems for math, or “maths” as they called it here, and answered questions about income elasticity for my economics class.

  The next time I stopped to check the clock on my phone, I was flabbergasted to find that I’d been at the library for almost two and a half hours.

  I opened my mouth in a yawn and rolled my neck in a circle to loosen my gooey brain. That’s when I glimpsed him three carrels over. His head was bent and I couldn’t see much more than curling black hair, but I was certain it was Joel Sinclair even before he looked up, turned two tiger eyes my way and caught me staring.

  I blanched, but he only raised his dark eyebrows before going back to his work. Untucking my hair from behind my ears and forcing myself to breathe through my nose, I tried to do the same.

  Yeah right.

  Even with my eyes forward, I could still make out the shape of Joel. His arm was bent and one hand rested under his jaw, his long index finger tapping slowly against his cheek. He’d taken his jacket off and draped it over the back of his chair. Gone was the ugly school tie. The sleeves of his white shirt were haphazardly rolled up and the top button of the collar was undone. In front of him, a slim silver laptop was open, casting a pale blue light over his face.

  Just then, he curled his hand into a fist and coughed. Once. Twice. I watched his Adam’s apple bob in his throat and that small movement was what snapped me back to reality. What was I doing? If Joel Sinclair caught me watching him again, he’d think I was certifiable.

  I turned back to my work. The words swam across the paper. The music playing from my phone whirred in my head making me slightly dizzy, but I hunkered down. For a few minutes it even worked. I took notes and moved to the next section of my economics textbook, but then I felt a tickle—one that had me thinking of crawly spiders and things with wings—skirt over the back of my neck.

 

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