Starstruck

by Cyn Balog

  “That’ll never happen,” I say, pointing to the black line. “This bakery has been here for a century, and that’s the worst we ever got.”

  “Okay. But I hope you can swim, because you won’t have me to rescue you.”

  I glare at him.

  He bursts out laughing. “What? You’ve lived on an island your whole life and you never learned how to swim?”

  I feel a growl growing in my throat. My father used to take me to the beach when I was a baby, but he left when I was two. Since then, I’ve been under the care of a single mom with a business and two kids. She never thought it worth the money to buy a badge to get onto the beach. Most of the time, I played around inside while she worked. The back of the bakery is a heaven for little kids, a gigantic maze of machines and racks and tables. Sometimes, after he spent a few hours on the beach with his parents, Wish would sneak over to the bakery to play hide-and-seek, or board games. Because it was better than the beach; you didn’t have to worry about getting sand in your crotch or a sunburn. I’d planned to learn how to swim, but then certain things ended up getting in the way. My big butt, for one. “I … can,” I fib, but I see by his face that he doesn’t believe me.

  Hans turns back to his donuts, and Christian continues to smile smugly at me.

  “So, why would you clip that article for me?” I grumble as I pick up another tray, this one of freshly baked crumb cake. Somehow, even though I lost most of the contents of my stomach overnight, I haven’t lost my appetite. I could eat half the tray in a blink. I turn to him and bat my eyelashes. “I’m flattered. I didn’t know you cared.”

  He ignores me. “I can explain. This afternoon. Do you have time?”

  “No,” I say pointedly. Because if it’s more crap about how the island of Cellar Bay is doomed to disappear under the sea, I would rather show up at school wearing nothing but a thong. But he’s looking at me, for the first time, very seriously, and it’s enough to make me curious. So I say, coolly, “Don’t you think I have better things to do than spend time with you?”

  He exhales. “Fine. I just clipped the article because I thought you could do something about it.”

  “Me?” I ask, wondering what could possibly have led him to so drastically overestimate my abilities. Shoving ten donuts down my throat in a minute is not quite a superpower. “What about me made you think that I have any influence over the tides?”

  He hefts a particularly heavy tray of cinnamon bread loaves onto his shoulder and shrugs. “Maybe you don’t, but you do have some influence over your boyfriend, don’t you?”

  27

  THE STORMS START LATE that morning. The rain pounds the roof of our apartment, sliding down the windows in rivulets. We keep them open just a crack, because we don’t have air-conditioning, so my skin feels clammy. It’s midday, but even though my bedroom is dark, like just before nightfall, I can’t sleep. I spend most of the time staring at the boot on the ceiling, wondering what Christian can possibly mean. He can’t be suggesting that Wish has something to do with the tides. I never mistook the dreadlocked, Spenser-loving guy for sane, but this would make him completely off his rocker.

  By one, when his shift ends, I’m dying of curiosity. I go downstairs in the pouring rain, drenching myself, and try to stroll into the store nonchalantly, as if looking for something for lunch. Christian appears in the door to the back room with a tray of sourdough loaves. He laughs. “Tip you over, pour you out?”

  It’s only then I notice I have one hand on my hip and one hand frozen in the air, kind of like a teapot. I drop my arms to my sides and say, “Whatever.”

  He starts slowly unloading the loaves of bread into the display case.

  “It’s after one. Your shift is over.”

  He keeps unloading the loaves, as if he didn’t hear me. Jerk.

  “Hello?” I ask, getting more impatient. “Can we get a move on?”

  He picks up the empty tray. “A little impatient, are we?”

  “I can’t sit around waiting for you all day. I have things to do,” I say. Like lie in bed.

  “Well, aren’t we popular?” he says in a sarcastic way that tells me he knows I’m not. He unties his apron, piles it on the counter, and heads for the door. “Let’s go.”

  “Where are we going? Outside?” I ask, doubtful. After all, it’s raining buckets, cold rain. I was hoping all the answers could be found inside the bakery.

  He nods. “To the beach.”

  I sigh. Awesome. I never go to the beach when it’s sunny and perfect, and he wants me to trek up there in a torrential downpour. I pull the hood of my sweatshirt over my ears and motion for him to lead the way. But I get three steps and I’m already soaked and shivering. The wind whips my hood from my head. This sucks. Anything he has to tell me cannot be worth this. “Hold on. Are you showing me something related to Wish ‘playing with powers he can’t control’?” I ask as we hurry up the block, past Melinda’s hotel. The parking lot is empty and the Vacancy sign is blinking. Usually, she has guests staying until the end of September, but the place looks abandoned.

  “Yeah.”

  “Okay.” I turn on my heel and march back toward the bakery. As I do, I have to blink away the raindrops that fall into my eyes. “I’m going home. You’re nuts.”

  He grabs me by the arm. “Hear me out. You’ll want to see this.”

  I stop. By now, my hair is hanging in strings over my eyes and the hood of my sweatshirt is so heavy with water it feels like a cinder block around my neck. I think I could even wring out my undies. “I’m listening. Just make it quick. I’m getting pneumonia.”

  “There was an ancient race of people who thought that people’s behaviors were controlled by the stars. Did you know that?”

  I snort. “Oh, sure. I saw that on Oprah last week.”

  He ignores my sarcasm. “You can see evidence of it in the way people still think that full moons cause deviant behavior.” He catches my confused look and says, “And astrology … it’s totally based on the belief that the stars control human behavior. At one point in time, astrology and astronomy were one and the same.”

  “All right. But eventually people learned that astrology is a bunch of crap.”

  He shoves his hands deeper into his pockets. “It’s not a myth. The stars do control our behavior. Our thoughts. Some of them, anyway.”

  “Really,” I say, doubtful, wishing he’d get to the point. If Wish is being controlled by the stars, I’m Princess Leia. But then again, that would explain why he still hasn’t broken up with me. I probably don’t look as big from outer space.

  “There was a cult in Europe in the seventeenth century that learned to control the stars, thereby controlling others,” he explains. “They’re called the Luminati.”

  “Wasn’t one of the Indiana Jones movies about this?”

  “The Da Vinci Code. And that was the Illuminati. Totally different.”

  “Oh.” Still, I have never once been given the impression that Wish is inclined to bite the heads off chickens or drink blood or whatever ancient cults did. “Interesting,” I say, “but not entirely applicable to our situation.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  “No. You don’t know what I know about Wish. We’ve known each other forever. Wish is Wish. He’s not part of some power-hungry ancient cult. Believe me.”

  “Well, the cult is still around. And it’s all over the world now. He may not be part of the organized cult, but he may have learned their practices. And that’s even more dangerous, the people who practice it alone, because they don’t know all the rituals well. And I’m not saying that he would control control people,” he says, a little flustered. “I’m talking about making people see things that aren’t real. About him.”

  Things that aren’t real? Wish is the most real, down-to-earth person I know. He wouldn’t … “How do you know all this?”

  “My mother was in Hollywood for a while. You said that’s where Wish lived. Some actors started using it i
n order to make themselves irresistible to their audience, and then their kids began using it, kids at the school I used to go to.…”

  “Using it? What do they do?”

  “It’s complicated. But somehow they get the stars to favor them. Tilting mirrors at the right angle toward them … wearing certain clothes … spending time under the sun … It requires a lot of precision. Part of the art of it is learning to use the stars without throwing off the balance of nature. This”—he waves his hands in the air—“is because your boyfriend isn’t particularly good at it, unfortunately.”

  “I’m sorry. That is really crazy,” I say, but all the while I’m thinking about the past few days with Wish. How he wore nothing but black, which absorbs the rays of the sun. How he tilted the rearview mirror so the light shone into his face. How he was so upset when it rained …

  “Think about it. There are millions of people in the world who read their horoscope these days because they believe the stars have some effect on them.”

  “Astrology is a bunch of crap,” I repeat, but then I remember Wish’s grandma Bertha and all her spells and crazy beliefs. Maybe she was part of the Luminati. She was really into astrology, Wish said, and when he first went to live with her in L.A., it really creeped him out. But eventually, he stopped talking about how nuts she was. I thought he’d just learned to live with it … but maybe he started believing in it? After all, he was always interested in the stars, calling me out in the middle of the night to come view them through his telescope on the beach. Maybe he …?

  “There must be some factual basis to it,” Christian says, but I’m not really listening. “Humans always try to control things about nature. Don’t you think that after all these years, someone might have found a way to control the stars?”

  We approach the ramp to the boardwalk and climb up to where the dune grass is whipping in the wind. When we get to the steps that head down to the beach, I gasp.

  It’s gone.

  Well, not gone gone. It’s obviously high tide. Normally, there’d be a long stretch of white sand before the sea. That was how it was last night, when I stumbled on Wish, lying on the sand. I think about him sprawled there, in a space that is now completely covered by water. Now the water is lapping at the dunes, right before us. The lifeguard stand, once in the center of the beach, is barely visible in the black water. The ocean is angry and choppy, with whitecaps everywhere, and the giant waves, bigger than I’ve ever seen, boom like thunder as they crash to the sand.

  “It’s been like this before,” I say weakly, though I can’t remember when.

  “Has it?”

  I nod. “It’s high tide. It will recede.”

  He shakes his head. “It’ll be high tide in three hours.”

  “Three?” I swallow. “But what does this have to do with controlling the stars?”

  “The sun is partly responsible for weather on Earth,” he says. “And the sun is—”

  “A star,” I finish. “And this cult, the Luminati …”

  “They’re secretive, but they exist. But it’s believed that people practicing alone caused a plague in London in the 1600s. And a drought and famine in India in the 1700s. And in 1887 there was a flood in China …,” he rattles on, making my head spin.

  “You’re joking.”

  “I wish I was,” he whispers very seriously. He turns his wrist and holds it for me to see. The rain drenches his skin as he points to a dark blob on it that would look like a birthmark if it weren’t greenish. “Can you see that?”

  I squint at it. “Unfortunate incident with a tattoo needle?”

  “No. It used to be a star. The mark of the Luminati. I had it altered.”

  I stare at him. “You mean …”

  “Those kids at my school. I was one of them.”

  “You were? So wait, what did you do?” I ask, my voice steadily rising. I can no longer keep the disgust out of it.

  He nods, looking away, sheepishly. “It’s not like we bit the heads off chickens, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “Um. I wasn’t,” I lie.

  “My friends got me into it. It seems pretty harmless when you start. We would go out on the beach, late at night, and perform the rituals. We’d lie on the sand and wear all black to absorb the rays and the power of the stars. It may sound crazy, but sometimes the power of the stars was so invigorating that it gave us life on its own—we didn’t need any other form of nourishment. We didn’t need to eat or sleep to have energy; we could breathe without taking a breath.” He pauses and inspects my face, which I know has lost all color. I can’t stop seeing Wish’s lifeless body on the sand, beneath the stars. Can his beauty really be only a facade? “So this is familiar to you.”

  “Um … no. It’s crazy to me. It’s not possible that a person, one person, could cause all this,” I answer. “If you want me to believe you, you have to show me.”

  “It’s kind of hard now. The cloud cover,” he says.

  “Sure it is. Fine. I’m going home. To sleep.”

  “No, you see, it’s bad. Like a drug. It’s addictive. I had to move away from them, convince myself that I could be anyone I chose on my own, without the help of the stars. It wasn’t easy.”

  I stare at him. It’s like he’s trying to convince me that aliens exist without producing the little green squishy bodies. For something as way out there as this, I need the physical evidence. I think he understands that, because he finally sighs and pushes the dreads out of his eyes.

  “All right. Fine. I’ll show you. As soon as the storm ends. Okay?” His voice is strained. “I just kind of promised myself I’d never do it again, so … I’ll only show you a few things.”

  “Okay.”

  He shrugs and starts to walk away from the churning black waves, and I take a few breaths, tasting the salty spray of the sea on my tongue before following him.

  A car horn beeps. A familiar red sports car kicks up a puddle near us, but I don’t feel the splash, because I’m already soaked. I stare at the car, too overwhelmed even to wonder why Rick would be beeping at me. The back window rolls down and I see Terra, wearing a pink hooded rain slicker. “Hey, girl!” she shouts at me.

  “Oh. Hi!” I say. I was hoping to have the whole weekend away from them so that they might forget my antics of last night. But it’s good to know that my pathetic behavior didn’t completely turn them off.

  “You were hilarious last night,” Erica drawls, leaning over Terra’s lap.

  “Oh. Thanks,” I say, though I know they were probably laughing at me instead of with me.

  “Did you have fun in the bathroom?” Erica gives me a wink.

  Unbelievable. Everyone thinks I was in the bathroom doing things with Wish instead of puking or having stomach problems, two unfortunate things that would normally have hung around the old Dough Reilly in an impenetrable haze. Wish the Sun God and Dough, Goddess of Lard, getting cozy in the bathroom. The stars must like me and be working in my favor, because I can’t imagine a group of people being denser. I peer past the raindrops on the front windshield and see Rick drumming his fingers on the steering wheel, like he’d rather be anywhere else. He has an arm draped around someone … someone with hair darker and curlier than Evie’s. When he catches me looking, he pulls his arm away from her back. I can’t be sure, but it looks like … Becca?

  Becca. Evie’s best friend.

  Interesting. And yet not entirely unexpected.

  Terra motions to the shoreline. “We had to come see this for ourselves. Isn’t it wild?”

  It takes me a minute to realize she isn’t talking about Christian’s bizarre theory about Wish’s plans for world domination. “Oh, yeah.”

  “I love these kinds of storms,” she gushes, rubbing her hands together greedily. Easy for her to say. She’s living on the mainland. She looks at Christian, taking in his dreads and the tattoos on his forearms, and raises her eyebrows, as if we were just exchanging bodily fluids. “Who’s your friend?”


  I fumble through the introductions. Erica smiles and whispers something in Terra’s ear, but it’s loud enough for anyone to hear. “Rowr, the bad boy.” Please. I should let him go all Oliver Twist on them.

  Terra babbles on. “One minute they’re predicting sun for the whole week, and the next minute, we’re in the middle of a huge nor’easter. The people who live here must be freaked. They can’t be at all prepared. I mean, this storm system totally came out of nowhere.”

  Christian gives me a sly grin. “Oh, I have a good idea of where it came from,” he mumbles.

  28

  THE RAIN CONTINUES TO POUND for the rest of the day, almost like it’s slamming directly against my skull, because I wind up with a massive headache. After the bakery closes, Mom comes upstairs and turns on the Weather Channel. I lie in bed, staring at the ceiling, only half listening to the cheery weather girl talking about “giant swells” and “gale-force winds.” The other part of my brain is trying to wrap itself around what Christian told me. It’s so stupid. Wish just has good genes and got lucky. People do that; I’ve seen people come back after a few months of summer vacation completely transformed, and Wish had a few years. It’s not possible to fool everyone into seeing him as gorgeous and charming when he’s not. And to cause a few natural disasters in the process. Not. Possible.

  Since I’ve known Wish forever, we should be able to talk about anything. I’m just making up my mind to come right out and ask him when the phone rings. My mom pushes aside the curtain in my doorway a second later. “It’s your boyfriend,” she says softly.

  All the resolve I built up quickly drains from my body. Yes, I vowed to confront him, but not now. I get up slowly, hoping my resolve will magically return by the time I cross the kitchen to the phone. No surprise that it doesn’t. When Mom hands me the phone, I see a worry wrinkle above her nose. “Make it quick,” she whispers, her face serious. “We need to keep the line open.”

  “Hello?” I answer, nowhere near the confident vixen I’ve been trying to portray in recent days.