STAR (A 44 Chapters Novel)

by BB Easton

  I also felt the power that Knight held over me beginning to lift. No longer would the story of what had happened on C Hall be about the time I got attacked by my ex while a hundred kids did nothing but watch. Now, it would be the story of the time a stubborn football-team dropout with aqua-blue eyes and sandy-brown hair chased him off.

  I smiled to myself as I made the rounds, turning on every light in my apartment and triple-checking all the locks. I called my parents to tell them about my acceptance letter. I called Juliet to tell her, too. I did not call Goth Girl. She was still on my shit list for telling Hans that I’d been hanging out at Jason’s.

  Bitch.

  That only left Hans. I knew he’d said he “wouldn’t have cell service,” but it couldn’t hurt to leave him a voicemail, right? And besides, maybe he was already on his way home from “camping” and would have a signal.

  And maybe I kind of sort of wanted to check up on him a little bit.

  I sat down on the couch we’d “borrowed” from Hans’s parents’ basement—the same one he used to pull outside whenever he had people over—and dialed his number as a churning cesspool of acid swirled in my stomach.

  It’s fine, I told myself. He’s either going to answer or you’re going to leave a voicemail. It’s not like you’re deactivating a bomb. Jesus.

  Ring.

  Ring.

  Doodle-oodle-oo.

  I pulled the phone away from my ear and listened.

  Doodle-oodle-oo.

  It was Hans’s ringtone!

  I leaped off the sofa and listened again, trying to figure out which direction to go.

  Doodle-oodle-oo.

  I followed the sound into the bedroom where Hans’s four-poster bed stood in a state of disarray in the center of the room. The only other furniture in there was a dresser, also “borrowed” from the Oppenheimers, and two cheap bedside tables that I’d bought at Walmart.

  Doodle-oodle-oo.

  I rummaged through a pile of dirty clothes on the floor of our walk-in closet until I found it, tucked inside the pocket of his dark gray Dickies.

  Hans’s cell phone.

  I sat on the edge of the bed and stared at the small hunk of plastic. I’d never gone through somebody’s phone before. Not because I had morals, but because, with the guys I dated, I was simply too afraid of what I might find.

  But I was sick of being afraid. I needed to sleep at night. I needed to eat without wanting to throw up. I needed answers. And that little black Motorola had them.

  Having made up my mind, I took a deep breath and illuminated the screen, ready to face whatever I’d find inside, but the word PASSCODE in all caps stopped me in my tracks. Four blank spaces glowed beneath it, taunting me.

  He has a fucking password?

  I tried his birthday. I tried my birthday. I tried 1234. I tried his parents’ address. I tried our address. I was about to try a ball-peen hammer when the digital clock in the top-right corner of the screen changed from 11:10 to 11:11.

  Eleven eleven.

  I pictured the whites of John the Psychic’s eyes as he muttered that number to me the winter before. It had become my lucky number, my favorite time, but maybe it was more than that. Maybe that number had the power to deliver me to the truth.

  I crossed my fingers, held my breath, and typed in 1111.

  It worked.

  “Thank you, John,” I whispered out loud, hoping that, wherever he was, he could hear me.

  First, I scrolled through his list of Contacts. Half of them were girls’ names. And by girls, I mean strippers. They all ended in I. Kandi, Mandi, Bambi, Tammi, Toni, Baloni.

  And there, at the bottom, in the V section, was Victoria motherfucking Beasley.

  The traitor.

  I checked Hans’s call log to see when she’d tattled on me, but I didn’t get an exact answer.

  Because that bitch had been calling Hans almost every day for the last two months.

  Bile climbed its way up my throat, burning my esophagus and choking me with its acrid taste. Fifteen minutes here, thirty minutes there, forty-two minutes while I was at work, fifty-nine minutes while Hans was supposed to be in class.

  Wait. What? No. No, no, no…

  I hopped off the bed in a panic and raced to the dining room. The only furniture in that small space was my computer desk and a chair. My backpack lay on the desk, full to bursting with textbooks and notebooks and supplies of all kinds. Hans’s lay slumped over on the floor in the corner. I grabbed it and dumped it out in the middle of the floor. Books and crumpled papers and prescription pill bottles and ziplock baggies full of weed and tiny glass vials with white powdered residue inside tumbled to the ground in an avalanche of truth.

  I sank to the floor and admired the pile with someone else’s eyes. Someone removed from the situation. Someone who would give me a full report later, when I was ready to hear it.

  She looked at everything, taking mental notes for me. She commented that every paper had a failing grade on it, and none of them had a date later than early October. She deduced that Hans must have dropped out right before midterms, which was probably around the time that he converted his backpack into a drug storage unit. Oxycodone, Percocet, Lortab, OxyContin—eight orange prescription bottles in all.

  Then that girl went to work. She didn’t want to leave a mess on the floor for me to find later. She was far too considerate for that. Instead, she carried the contents of Hans’s backpack to the coffee table and arranged everything as if she were creating a beautiful table display at Macy’s. She stacked the pristine, never-opened textbooks in the back, for some height. Fanned the stack of papers out in front so that the failing grades were visible on each one. She created an orange pyramid out of the prescription bottles, off to the side for a mid-height focal point, then laid the clear vials in an asterisk shape on top of the papers, for just a touch of sparkle.

  Oh!

  Running into the bedroom, she came back with the finishing touch. The cherry that would top off her arrangement of lies.

  Hans’s cell phone.

  Now when BB got back, maybe the truth would be easier for her to look at. Now it was pretty. Organized. Under control.

  Unlike that filthy apartment.

  Maybe I should vacuum, the girl thought. Mop the kitchen floor. I can’t remember the last time BB dusted. Or made her bed. The tile in the shower is mildewed. I could take care of that real quick. Maybe empty the trash cans while I’m at it.

  I didn’t feel. I didn’t think. I cleaned. I cleaned and I cleaned and arranged and organized until the sun came up and my arms shook from hunger and my eyes went blurry from lack of sleep. Then, I cleaned some more.

  It wasn’t until the birds were chirping, the sun was streaming in through the spotless sliding glass door, and I was in the middle of rearranging the candleholders on the mantel for the third time when I finally heard his key in the lock.

  I spun around and watched from where I stood on the fireplace hearth as Hans dragged himself up the stairs.

  He was not wearing camping gear.

  He was not carrying camping gear.

  He was wearing a T-shirt and baggy jeans. He’d pulled a gray beanie on over his shaggy, unwashed hair. And he reeked of cigarettes and cheap perfume. I could smell it from across the room.

  I don’t know if it was seeing him like that, the scent of Victoria’s Secret body spray instead of campfire smoke on his clothes, or the sheer physical exhaustion of staying up all night, but all of my precious defense mechanisms abandoned me at once.

  Poof.

  Suddenly, it was just me and Hans.

  And the pain I’d been running from.

  And the truth he’d been hiding.

  And an art installation of evidence on the coffee table between us.

  When Hans reached the top of the stairs, I watched his bloodshot eyes travel across the pristine apartment, take in my tortured, sleepless face, then land on all of his lies, now a neatly arranged centerpiece for the
sham that was our home.

  Hans stared at the pile the way you would stare at your new puppy—if you came home to find it dead on your living room floor.

  Hans didn’t look at me. Didn’t speak. He simply stumbled over to the couch, sat down, rested his elbows on his knees, and buried his face in his palms.

  A million questions pooled in my mouth.

  Who are you?

  Where is Hans?

  What did you do with him?

  Will I ever see him again?

  Are you an addict?

  What do I do now?

  Why did you do this to me?

  But the one I went with was, “Where the fuck were you?”

  Hans sighed, long and heavy, and rubbed his temples with his fingers. I was about to repeat my question when he finally admitted, “The Pink Pony.”

  “Yeah, you fuckin’ smell like it. Is that where you met Kandi, Brandi, Mandi, and Sandi? Looks like you’ve been chattin’ them up a lot.”

  “Baby…”

  “No”—I raised my voice and stepped onto the carpet, shoving a trembling finger in his direction—“do not fucking baby me. While you were off getting lap dances and doing blow all weekend, I was here, scrubbing your toilet, folding your laundry, and trying to study on zero hours of sleep because I was up all night wondering when the fuck you were gonna come home.”

  “I’m sorry.” Hans shook his head, still buried in his palms.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” I tilted my head from side to side and sang the words in a taunting, whiny voice. “That’s all I ever hear from you anymore. You know what I wanna hear? Just once? How about, Thanks? Or, Hey, let’s go out tonight? Or, Why don’t you let me do those dishes? Or, Guess what. I’m gonna pay my half of the rent this month? Oh! I got one! How about, Hey, congratulations on getting into grad school? Oh, wait. You don’t know about that because you weren’t fucking here when I got the letter!”

  I took a giant step over to the coffee table and smacked Hans’s cell phone off the top of the prescription bottle pyramid. I’d hoped it would crash into the wall and shatter into a thousand pieces, but it didn’t. It landed on the fucking love seat with a cute little bounce.

  Which only pissed me off more.

  Adrenaline was pouring into my extremities. My fists were balled. My teeth were bared. I wanted to yank Hans’s head up by his dirty fucking hair and force him to look me in the eye. I wanted to slap him across the face and scream at him for being no better than every other guy I’d ever known. Then I wanted to crawl into his lap and make him hold me while I cried myself to sleep.

  But it was pointless. Hans wouldn’t fight back. He couldn’t. Not only because there was no excuse for his behavior, but also because he was so drunk or high or both that he was having trouble staying upright.

  “Fuck this. You’re not even gonna remember this conversation. I’m going to class.” I stomped into the dining room and grabbed my backpack.

  “Wait.” Hans stood up and blocked my path to the stairs, holding his hands out in front of him. “I’m sorry. I am. I know I say that a lot, but that doesn’t make it not true.”

  “M’kay,” I said, looking at him with dead eyes.

  “I…fuck…” Hans rubbed the back of his neck. “I love you, BB.”

  “No,” I snapped. “You don’t. You love what I do for you. You love how I pay your rent and suck your dick and clean your house and keep my fucking mouth shut while you play rock star on the weekends. You don’t even love yourself anymore. Look at you.”

  As Hans glanced down to take in his disheveled appearance, I tried to scoot between him and the wall.

  He blocked my path at the last minute. “Don’t go. Please? You don’t have to go.”

  “Yes, I do!”

  “Are you coming back?”

  That one gave me pause. I honestly hadn’t thought about it. I had no plan. No bag packed. But the idea of spending another minute in that apartment with that fucking smell made me want to vomit. The only thing that would make me consider inhabiting that space again was standing right in front of me, but he was too far gone to even hope for.

  “I’ll come back when Hans does,” I snapped, trying to push past him again.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  I took a step back and looked him square in the eyes. “That means that you”—I gestured to the man before me with the sunken eyes and the hollow cheeks and the pants falling off his narrow hips—“are not my fucking boyfriend. I don’t love you! I love the boy who held my hand and bought me flowers and took me to concerts. I love the boy who once tried to kiss every single one of my freckles. I love the boy who used to stay up all night, writing lyrics while he watched me sleep.”

  Frustrated, mournful tears filled my eyes as I remembered how happy we’d once been. The hope that we could re-create that summer of bliss, that we could get back there and stay forever, had become a mirage on the horizon of my life. But I’d finally reached the end of the desert, and there was no oasis in sight. Just a year and a half of footprints behind me—two sets at first, then at the end, only one.

  “That’s who I love. Not you. I don’t even know who the fuck you are. All you do is lie to me and leave me alone, and I…I hate you.”

  Tears spilled from Hans’s denim-colored eyes in quiet, remorseful streams. “It’s me, baby,” he said with a quiet sniffle. “It’s still me. I’m so sorr—”

  “Stop saying that!” I screamed, pushing past him and grabbing my purse off the end table in the living room.

  “I can’t live without you!” Hans’s voice broke as he rushed to block my way to the stairs. The movement only made the pungent strawberry-kiwi-jasmine-pear-rose-gardenia fragrance coming off of him that much stronger. I suppressed my gag reflex along with my tears. “I’ll do anything. Please. Anything. I can’t lose you. Just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it.”

  I turned to face him, pulling my shoulders back and holding my head high. But no amount of false confidence could keep my chin from buckling when I said the three saddest words in the English language, “No, you won’t.”

  Hans’s chin quivered, too. “Yes, I will,” he whispered, his words a token gesture without conviction. “Please, baby. Just give me a chance.”

  “Fine. I want you to choose. Me…or the lifestyle.”

  I waited for Hans to do what he did best—tell me what I wanted to hear. Tell me that he needed me. That he’d sober up. That he’d spend every minute of the rest of his life trying to make me happy again. Hell, maybe he’d even turn his empty promises into another song. Record it for his next album so that he could make even more money to blow on even more drugs and even fancier strip clubs.

  But, in a rare act of honesty, Hans said nothing. He spared me the lie. He let his tears speak for him.

  And he let me walk out the door.

  I only made it halfway to school before my crying fit got so bad that I had to pull over. I wasn’t safe to drive. I hadn’t slept in over twenty-four hours. I hadn’t eaten in about as long. The adrenaline was wearing off, and all that was left was exhaustion and tears.

  So. Many. Tears.

  There was no way I could go to school like that, so I turned my car around and headed home.

  Or at least, headed to what I thought of as home.

  My parents welcomed me with open arms, but it was clear that my status in their household had permanently shifted from resident to visitor while I was gone.

  It had only been four months since I moved out, but in that time, my mom had rearranged my bedroom furniture, taken down all four hundred of the photos, magazine clippings, band posters, and drawings that I’d wallpapered the room with, and painted the whole thing pastel blue. Then, as the final touch in the generic guest-room look she’d been going for, my mom had hung a framed print of Van Gogh’s Water Lilies above the bed.

  I was officially homeless.

  As much as I wanted to just curl up and die, being in that room onl
y depressed me more, so I sat at the kitchen table instead, drinking the whiskey my mom had given me to help me “calm down.”

  She’d tried to give me a Xanax, but I’d told her, “No, thanks.”

  If I saw one more orange prescription bottle that day, I was going to lose my shit.

  Again.

  “Honey, are you sure you don’t want to come into the living room and watch TV? You look so bored in here.”

  I glanced down the hallway into the living room where my dad was quietly strumming a red Fender Stratocaster while he watched the daily doom and gloom on CNN.

  “Nah, I’m fine. Just need to think.”

  My mom smiled and sat across from me, her own wine in hand. “Pretty sure I’ve never said those words.” She chuckled. “Most of the time, I’m trying not to think.”

  “Maybe that’s my problem.” I smiled back weakly.

  “Yeah, I’m pretty sure you do enough thinking for the both of us.” Her long red hair was loose, and she’d changed out of her teacher clothes into a T-shirt with the Hindu goddess Ganesh on the front and a pair of yoga pants. “So, what are you thinking about right now?”

  I sighed and felt my eyes begin to sting before the words even came out. “I’m just wondering…if I should have tried harder. You know?” I glanced down the hallway at my dad playing that red guitar, so kind, so sensitive, so lost to his passion. “I should have gotten him some help. Or gone with him on the road more. Or…I don’t know…supported him more. But I just gave up.” My chin—my stupid, traitorous chin—wobbled uncontrollably as fresh, hot tears began to flow. “I love him so much, and I just walked away.”

  My mom reached across the table and squeezed my hand. She bore witness to my pain, sat in it with me, and stayed strong so that I could safely break.

  Once my cries dissolved into whimpers, my mom refilled our glasses from the bottle of merlot on the table, stroked the back of my knuckles with her thumb, and said, “Honey, I know you love him, but you did the right thing.”

  I looked up into eyes just like mine. Earthy green. Tired. Sad. A little drunk. Haggard from the agony of loving a musician.

  “I love your father. I do. He’s a good man, he loves me very much, and he gave me you.” She smiled with glistening eyes and squeezed my hand again. “But if I had it to do over, I’d marry a fucking accountant.” She laughed, wiping an errant tear from the corner of her eye.