The Liar's Guide to the Night Sky

by Brianna R. Shrum

I arch my eyebrow even though he can’t see it and, before I can say anything, he says, “Well. Most of the time.”

  “You go to Shabbat dinner?”

  “Yeah,” he says.

  “Like . . . every Friday?” I don’t even do Shabbat dinner every Friday. Or like. Any Friday.

  “Yeah,” he says. I feel him shrug against my back and ribs.

  “You’re not—you’re not Jewish, though.”

  “No,” he says. “Not Jewish. Just . . .” He trails off and his fingers slip under the hem of my shirt, calloused tips rubbing rough against my skin. Slow and soft pressure, like it’s nothing, like this is nothing, and I guess it is nothing compared to the fact that we’re basically halfway to dying on top of a mountain. But it doesn’t feel like nothing.

  Neither does however he was going to end that sentence.

  “Just what?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Come on.”

  “Jesus, don’t be such a nag.”

  “Tell me what you were going to say.”

  His fingers go still on my skin and he says, “What the hell? Who are you going to tell? We’re gonna become icicles up here anyway.”

  I swallow hard.

  He says, “I’m not Jewish. And I don’t really have any interest in becoming Jewish, I don’t think. I just . . . god, this is so stupid; it’s gonna make me sound like a kid. I’m nineteen. But—I wish sometimes? That like . . .” His voice is weirdly hoarse and I can feel his face move, like he’s looking away from me even though we aren’t facing each other. “That like . . . I were a Jacob. You know?”

  Wow, it’s like being stabbed through the ribs. I do know.

  “My name even fits, right?” He laughs. If he can make a joke out of it, it won’t be like he’s peeling his skin away for me to inspect all his insides. “Jaxon, Jolie, and Jonah Jacob.”

  “You get that a lot, right?” I say.

  He grunts. “I hate it.”

  “Yeah? Why?”

  “Because I’m not one. I can’t like . . . just be one.”

  “Why do you want to be a Jacob so bad?” I think about it—about what it means. To be a Jacob. It means being part of this messy, exhausting family that hates each other half the time, but the other half . . . well. The other half, we are moving across the entire country to be with the one who needs us right now.

  I think about my zayde and the realization that if we don’t get this figured out, I’ll never see him again and he will just have to die without me, and it stabs me in the chest. I shut my eyes tight and force the thought away.

  I can’t. I can’t.

  I shake my head and melt back into this moment.

  With Jonah.

  His fingers are moving again; I’m so hyperaware of my stomach and hips—the bulge of the muscle and softness of the bump of fat and the nerves on my skin that he just. Keeps. Touching.

  I wriggle farther back into him, like I can. Like this is normal.

  He doesn’t protest. He just widens his thighs so I can slip farther into them.

  “I don’t want anything to do with your parents,” he says. “No offense.”

  That stings a little, but I very extremely get it. “None taken.”

  “You grandparents are pretty cool, and some of your cousins. But I don’t know. Like, my family’s—I’m kind of on my own a lot. They’re good people, just, like, Mom’s busy teaching and coaching and doing all this extra shit to pull money together because Dad got locked up when I was little for a decade for weed. For weed.”

  “A decade?” I sputter.

  “I’m not shitting you.”

  Jesus Christ, my dad has smoked weed. And it’s legal in Colorado. What the fuck?

  “For marijuana?”

  “Yes,” he says, then he repeats me all primly, “For ma-ri-jua-na.”

  I rolls my eyes and elbow him lightly in the stomach and he closes his hand around my elbow, grinning against my cheek.

  The grin fades and he says, “He’s a good dad, and my mom’s good, too. System wants to take Black fathers from their sons and it worked, ’cause it always works, and why do you think I want to get into politics? Why do you think activism means so much to me?”

  “That . . .”

  He tenses, just the slightest bit behind me, and I wonder what he expects me to say. How I’m supposed to react. There are a thousand wrong ways, I think.

  I just say, “That fucking sucks.”

  “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah. He’s back now and that’s good, but he works his ass off, too, trying to make up for all the years he was gone, and I just don’t see much of anyone, Hallie.”

  I want to touch him.

  I don’t know how.

  I just . . . stay. Right where I am. His heart beating into my back.

  “Being a Jacob seems real easy from where I’m sitting. Your aunt and uncle, they’re like family. They’re always just—there, I guess. Adah and Reuben both treat me like I’m one of them, and you have these big family gatherings and shit, and I love that, too. I don’t know. I want to be a Ramirez. I’m proud I’m a Ramirez. But I always kind of wanted to be a Jacob, too, and it sucks that I can’t be.”

  “Yeah, you can,” I say.

  “Not likely.”

  “Family’s who you choose.”

  He says, “Blood is thicker than water, right?”

  “Pretty sure the saying is The blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb. It’s about friends becoming family, man.”

  “Huh,” he says.

  I don’t even mean to say: “Not like I’ve ever really chosen anyone.”

  Jonah is a man of few words.

  I say, “None of my friends even really text me anymore. I’ve barely moved! But like . . . ” I shift against his legs and his fingers curl into my hip and I pull out my phone. “Empty.”

  “Well,” he says helpfully, “it’s dead.”

  I roll my eyes and shove the phone back in the bag. “It’s not gonna make a difference.”

  “So . . .” He’s kind of searching for words. Like I can relate to this girl! Definitely! I know what questions to ask! It comes out almost unnatural when he says, “Who’s not doing the texting? You or them?” Like I asked him to braid my hair and he’s fumbling.

  I open my mouth to answer and then shut it again.

  I don’t—well, I don’t know. Them.

  Them?

  Jesus.

  I can feel the furrow deep in my brow. I want to say it’s them. None of them ever really made much of an effort; I haven’t had a Best Friend who wasn’t just the Best Out Of All My Friends I Guess since like the fourth grade. Shelly Petryova who moved in January to Oklahoma and we never spoke again.

  “I—them,” I say.

  Jonah drags his spine over the wood wall, repositions himself by centimeters.

  “It’s not like we were ever close or something, really.”

  He says, “Who?”

  “Me and my friends.”

  “Like . . . all of them?”

  I shrug. It physically hurts to say this, like, my stomach hurts in that same way that it hurts when a teacher calls you out in the middle of class and you’re so out of it that you don’t know whether the correct answer is 19 or James Joyce. “I’m busy. I’m always, I’m just pretty busy.”

  “Okay,” he says, that quiet rasp in his throat.

  “It’s hard to have time for friends when you’re getting a whole year of college under your belt.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Like how am I going to have time for slumber parties? I’m busy starting IVs.”

  “Do high school girls still call them slumber parties?”

  “Sleepovers. Whatever. Fuck you.”

  I feel him shrug against my back. “You don’t have to get defensive, dude; I’m not accusing you of something.”

  “Yes you are.”

  “What am I accusing you of?”

  “Of being a shitty friend!”

&nb
sp; The wood swallows the reverb.

  I blink at the dark and breathe.

  He doesn’t have to say that no, he didn’t say that.

  And I am learning that Jonah does not say things he doesn’t have to say.

  Unless he’s lying about the stories of the stars. But maybe he had to say all of that, too. Maybe he had to say it to keep me from coming apart.

  The wind carries the snow outside, and I can hear all the little flakes tumbling, being pulled along in the dark.

  Who do I even miss?

  There’s not even one specific name that jumps to the front of my brain; it’s just my friends. Them. Massachusetts. You know.

  I wonder if all people who have plans feel this way.

  Like who the fuck has time to care about people in the kind of way that lasts past high school?

  Or if it’s just me.

  I pull my arms across my chest, and I know it’s defensive. I can feel myself trying to cover up that small piece of my heart that he doesn’t get to see. I don’t even really want to see it. How dare he make me look?

  Who has the time or the energy? To give a shit.

  I say, “We should go to sleep.”

  He waits a while before he says, “Okay.”

  And his arms tighten around me in the deep dark.

  We fall asleep like that, back to chest, and sometimes I can feel the rhythm of his breathing and I know he’s unconscious.

  Sometimes I wake up and I didn’t know I was asleep.

  It’s . . . it’s warm enough.

  But god, it’s cold.

  God.

  It’s dark.

  God.

  It’s . . . lonely.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  “YOU UP?” HE WHISPERS against my neck when it’s still dark outside, and I’m in that twilight state where the only honest answer is What is it to really be awake? What is the human condition, Jonah?

  I say instead, “What is, texts you receive from an Aries at two in the morning, Alex.”

  “I’m a Scorpio, thank you very much.”

  “Oh god, even worse.”

  He laughs, whisper of air lighting over my skin.

  “Pretty fuckin’ gay of you, Jacob.”

  “What’s gay?”

  “Astrology jokes.”

  “Well, Ramirez, I’ll have you know I’m decently fucking gay.”

  “Yeah?”

  The wind has calmed down outside so it’s dead quiet between the ask and the answer until this crying woodwind of a sound glissandos from low to high, reaching from the ground and aiming at the sky.

  I tense, gritting my teeth as several others join that haunting cry outside.

  They’re wolves—of course they are.

  And wolves can’t climb trees, so the sudden fear chilling my blood is irrational. Completely irrational. But the same part of my brain that has me ducking when thunder claps or pulling my covers up to my chin when my closet door creaks open in the middle of the night has me freezing up when I hear wolves miles away on the ground.

  “Yes,” I say. Kind of weirdly primly, given the situation. “I’ve dated around the gender wheel.”

  “The gender wheel? That’s not one I’ve heard.”

  “Honestly, it’s not one I’ve ever said. I don’t even know what it means; I’m pretty sleepy.”

  “So go back to sleep.”

  “Nah,” I say, and my body chooses that moment to move, to brush neck over chest. He sucks in a breath.

  He says, “I’ve dated around the gender wheel myself.”

  I don’t know why that’s surprising. I guess it’s not, to be honest. Jonah Ramirez could flirt with a lamppost and get a response, and probably has. “Yeah?” I say.

  “Mm. I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m pansexual.”

  I shift against him, and his stubble brushes my hair, prickles at my scalp. “What’s the difference, even?”

  “Well,” he says, “when a man only loves women very much, that’s what we call a straight person—”

  “Ugh.” I roll my eyes and shove his arm, even though the angle is difficult to hit.

  I want . . . I’m looking for excuses to touch him, even though I’m already pressed against his entire body. Even though I can feel the rise and fall of his chest pressing into each bump in my spine. Rolling against every muscle in my back.

  I can hear the smile in his voice when he says, “Between what? That and bisexual?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Like, I’m bi. But I’m not like, only into two genders or something.”

  He thinks for a while.

  He does that, I’m noticing. Falls into these sudden silences I never had the time to notice.

  He says, “I don’t know. For me, it just like . . . it fits.”

  That’s not exactly satisfying to me, but it doesn’t really need to be.

  “Like,” he says, “I don’t know how it is for everyone else. Or for all the pansexuals in the world or whatever. But I just . . . don’t give a fuck about gender. Like it doesn’t even factor in.”

  “You don’t see gender?” My mouth curls.

  He sighs; it’s somewhere between snarky and indulgent. “Kind of, I guess. It’s like . . . I just literally don’t care about it. I’m into people; that’s it. Same way that I don’t really give a shit about . . . I don’t know. Ankles.”

  “Ankles?”

  “Ankles,” he says, and the amusement is sparking in his voice.

  “Your sexual orientation is ankles.”

  “No, I don’t care about ankles, Jacob. Keep up.”

  “Panankleual.”

  “Jesus Christ,” he says, and he laughs into my hair.

  I don’t just feel it on my head. On my neck.

  I feel it shooting down into my stomach, lighting up my legs, curling my toes.

  I wonder if he feels the quick hitch in my breath.

  If he notes it when my muscles tense.

  I wonder if his pulse is pounding everywhere like mine is.

  The wolves howl again and I push back into him.

  His biceps tighten around me and he presses his fingers into spots on my arm that I have never in my life been so freaking aware of.

  It’s cold and it’s scary and I can’t even believe that my libido has the ability to function right now, but it does, and every single brain cell I have is focused on the nerves in my skin.

  The spiderweb of feeling that every single movement he makes laces over me.

  His thighs shift against mine.

  “It’s fucking cool,” he says.

  “What is?”

  “The wolves.”

  I blow a breath out. Slow. Shaking.

  Lean into him, because he is the only thing solid on this mountain in the dark.

  “That’s a constellation, too,” he says.

  “The wolves?”

  “Mmhmm,” he lies.

  “Tell me about them.”

  “If we could see the stars right now, I’d point you to the tiniest ones in the sky. So far off you can barely see them, even now when the other ones are bright. The Greeks said that the wolves howled at night when they lost their brothers in the stars.”

  “No they didn’t,” I whisper.

  “Don’t be scared,” he says. “They’re sad. That’s all.”

  He brushes his fingers over my arm and hesitates at my neck.

  The only sound in here is our breathing in the close quiet—and the wind, which is slowly stilling outside.

  The wolves.

  The hairs on the back of my neck rise when I feel his mouth brush, so lightly it’s almost not even real, over my neck.

  The edges of his teeth.

  God, I swear I feel them.

  I curl my fingers into his thigh and release.

  He breathes out, warmth at the base of my scalp.

  He doesn’t touch me again, not with his mouth.

  I don’t touch him with anything but, Christ, practically all of me.

&n
bsp; The dark bleeds into morning gray.

  The wolves are quiet.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  IT SHOULD BE WARMER when the sun rises.

  Somehow, it seems colder.

  Maybe because it is, and maybe because the prospect of leaving this hunting blind is absolutely fucking terrifying.

  Both of us have been awake for an hour, maybe more, pretending to be asleep, because the idea of moving, the idea of descending this tree and stepping back into the snow, into the mountain feels . . . goddamn impossible.

  It feels like if we stay here, huddled together, everything is okay.

  It’s just a night in the woods.

  It’s just . . . it’s just a cold, poorly planned camping trip.

  But the second one of us speaks, we are lost again.

  We are dying in the woods.

  My stomach twists in hunger, and I grit my teeth and flare my nostrils, like I can will it away. If I just sit here, muscles stiff with sleep, curled against a warm, solid boy, I won’t be starving.

  But it’s so intense and growing until it’s all I can think about. Until it feels like my stomach is gnawing away at itself.

  I breathe.

  Listen to the quiet.

  Sink into the pain in my stomach and the sudden fear that maybe I’ll be too weak to climb down out of this tree, maybe it’s over now. Somewhere between last night and this morning, things have really started to hurt.

  I am the first one to speak.

  I say, “What’s the plan?”

  Jonah blows out a breath. “I guess . . . I guess we leave this blind.”

  “Is that it?”

  A long pause.

  “What else do you want me to say?”

  I don’t know.

  I don’t know what I want him to say.

  Something.

  Because I hate that the plan is wander and die.

  I hate that I have nothing because I always have something, and if he doesn’t have anything either then, god, we’re fucked.

  It’s up to chance and the bounds of the human body.

  And I absolutely do not trust either.

  I say, quiet, just this side of a whisper, “Let’s go.”

  Jonah takes another minute in the quiet.

  Waiting.

  Waiting.

  Waiting.

  Then we gather our things.

  And we go.

  The presence of those final granola bars in our bags is almost worse than if the wrappers had been empty.