The Language of Stars Read online

  Looking in from the outside was good enough for me. The truth is, spying through the windows of the Baylor place gave me another life, one I didn’t want to lose by walking inside. For just a few minutes, I lived there, too. I spoke in rhyme, I read just for fun, and I had a fancy celebrity father instead of Shepherd, who was, now that I’d gotten to know him up close and personal, worse than none at all.

  Prince Charming

  Sarah is a name from the Bible, right up front, in Genesis. Sarah was Abraham’s wife, and she had a baby when she was ninety years old. Considering that everyone lived a lot longer in those days, and that burning bushes talked and seas parted for the right people, this was probably only a minor miracle. But still. My mother was forty-five years old when I was born, which is why, after her brain unfroze from the shock, she named me Sarah. (She couldn’t name me after Sarah’s baby because he was a boy. And my life was definitely going to be hard enough without being called Isaac.)

  So two days after Thanksgiving, Mom had a kid no one was particularly thankful for: Sarah, the Surprise. Sarah, the Slipup. Sarah, the Last Thing Anybody in My Family Needed. As legend had it, Katherine Wheeler, a.k.a. my mother, enjoyed a sweet setup before she made the mistake of going out with Shepherd Ryan. She and Aunt Jocelyn shared a small condo on the best side of Whale Point, the ocean side. Mom had a good job with Her, which boasted the biggest circulation of any magazine in North Carolina. She had respect, independence, and just enough money to pretend that she was almost as rich as her neighbors.

  Until her boss turned fifty, and she volunteered to manage the birthday party. They celebrated at a small but pricey restaurant called Mamselle’s, where the maître d’ fell all over himself to make Mom sit up and take notice. That was when my father was good looking—in a gray-temples, shave-three-times-a-day kind of way. So all he had to do back then was smile and keep his sleaze factor on low. I can just picture Shepherd, leaning like a parenthesis or a broken lamp over her chair. I can hear him whispering, “May I help you?”  “May I get that for you?”  “Let me.”  “PURR-PURRR-PURRRRRR.”

  “How could I know every line out of that man’s mouth was scripted?” Mom asked the same question whenever she told the story of their “relationship.” By the time she got to the part where her crush had turned into a semiliterate deadbeat who wouldn’t even split the cost of my braces in sixth grade, she was steaming.

  “Let that be a lesson, Sarah.” Lately, she always finished her story the same way. “Weak knees do not a grand amour make.” Her fake smile was a warning. The future she saw for me was like the beach at low tide, studded with pebbles, driftwood splinters, and bits of broken glass.

  What she really meant was, Don’t fall in love. A love story didn’t fit in with my mother’s plans: She had decided, you see, that I was going to med school. And according to this grand scheme, hatched before I was even born, I would become a doctor—someone with talent, money, and influence. Someone who’d never have to wonder where next month’s car payment was coming from. And someone who would never, ever date anyone without initials after his name.

  Both of us made sacrifices for this rosy future, but only one of us understood why. Remember those shortcuts to success? I was five years old when my mother browbeat the school board into letting me skip kindergarten. Which meant I was always a year younger than most of the kids in my class. But it also meant Mom could call me “gifted.”

  If romance didn’t have any place in my mother’s version of my future, neither did the stage. Whether I got the lead in a play or landed Prince Charming, it was all the same to her—bad. Plays were fine, she’d conceded when I first tried out for parts in junior high and began to plaster my room with Sarah Bernhardt posters. Theater was a good creative outlet, but acting wasn’t a career. No ifs, ands, or buts.

  So no, she never came to my performances, and no, she never invited any of my friends, especially those of the male persuasion, past the front door. She seemed convinced that if she didn’t encourage what she called “distractions,” I’d forget about them. But of course, what she didn’t realize was they weren’t distractions, they were my life. So I kept going out with my friends. And I kept watching films of Sarah Bernhardt, papering my wall with posters of her most famous roles, and wishing I could make people cry and throw roses onstage the way she had.

  If I didn’t end up with roses from the audience, I did manage to catch the attention of the boy who came as close to Prince Charming as you could get at Whale Point High. When we met, Fry Reynolds and I were both juniors at WPH. Even though we’d had a lot of the same classes since freshman year, I don’t think he’d even noticed me before the fall play. He had a smile you couldn’t read, and he turned it, like a floodlight, on everyone. He was always surrounded by other kids, guys in goth black or wife-beaters under their wide-open shirts, girls with long legs, perfect lashes, and the kind of hair that would set off an alarm if it fell out of place.

  So the love story I might have told Mom, if she’d been interested enough to ask, was a lot more romantic than hers. It featured me as a lonely stand-in for a bit part in the first production of the year. And my prince? He wasn’t in the play at all—he and his friends had only joined the lighting crew so they could go to the cast party.

  By the last night of rehearsals, it was pretty clear that Stephanie Semple, who had the part I was understudying, was not going to get a fatal disease or even a cold. I was never going to play the Parisian flower girl who helps the hero win the French Revolution. But there was a consolation prize: He had finger-deep curls and dark chocolate eyes, and he could bounce a Ping-Pong ball from one bicep to the other. Really.

  “You would have been way better than Semple.” That’s what Fry told me after our final run-through. I was picking my way over the wires backstage and heading for the exit. I still carried my script with me, though I don’t know why I bothered. I never got to read a single line from it.

  “How do you know I’d be better?” I asked him. “You’ve never even seen me act.” I didn’t have time to be surprised that one of the coolest guys in the school was talking to me as though I were one of the coolest girls. All that registered was his lanky, heat-emitting body, much too close for breathing room.

  “Oh, I’ve watched you act, all right,” Fry assured me. “Every rehearsal, I hear you tell Semple how great she was.”

  He waited just long enough for all the blood to rush to my face. “Besides,” he added, “you’re twice as hot.”

  I turned on him, half angry at the way he’d seen through my runner-up’s faint praise, half dizzy with the compliment he’d tagged on at the end. “Look,” I told him, “you—”

  “Okay, okay.” He backed away, hands in front of those eyes and that smile. “Three times as hot.” He folded his arms, which he must have known showed off his muscles. “Now prove it.”

  “What?” I looked toward the orange eye of the exit sign. This guy had a reputation. Maybe there were worse things about him than fast talk.

  “Prove it,” he repeated. “Read me the scene.” He nodded at the copy of the play in my hand.

  I stared at my script, as if it were a mango or a porcupine. As if I were totally shocked to find it there.

  “Go on, read it.” I should have hated the look Fry gave me then, because it had nothing to do with my being hot. It was more like he was laughing at me, daring me to jump off a cliff. So I opened the script to the scene. Or, actually, it fell open to the place I’d dog-eared and mauled a million times. “André,” I read, embarrassed and angry at once, “you can’t give up.” But soon I was falling into my character, a dying girl saying good-bye. At first, I looked up at Fry between the lines I knew by heart. And then? I wasn’t looking at the lines at all. “Don’t you realize, my dear, that the children of tomorrow, of next year, and of centuries after that, are watching what we do now?”

  Fry unfolded his arms, and his eyes lost their challenge, focused on my face. The gym disappeared, and we were si
tting in the shadow of an old stone house on a street in Paris. “We have seen our friends killed today,” I told him. “And we will see more of them killed tomorrow.” I coughed, spit invisible blood. “But you will survive, André, and you will give our sons and daughters what we died for.” It wasn’t hard to see the boy in front of me as a fighter, a sturdy champion who could take hold of the future and change it for all of us. “If you have no faith in yourself, learn from me, my love. I believe in all you can be.”

  When the scene ended, I stood for a minute, breathless, empty. I woke from one dream into another when Fry started clapping. “I’m not sure what you said,” he told me, still staring with those intense, dizzy-making eyes. “But I loved the way your lips moved when you said it.” He stood closer now, then clapped again. His applause was so loud it echoed out across the empty seats and then came back to us, louder still. As if he’d tossed a single ball into the dark, and dozens had bouncd back. Or maybe an empty stage just makes everything you say and do bigger than it is.

  Which might explain why our first kiss—my first kiss ever—felt like the universe was coming unglued. Why two kids, alone onstage, kissing like stars in a ghost play, trumped every romance movie I’d ever seen, from Cinderella and Snow White, right up to the films with subtitles Aunt Jocelyn used to sneak me into. I didn’t see fireworks under my closed eyes, not exactly. It was more like things were growing there, wild things, soft but pushy, sweet but rude. Tiger lilies that roared:

  FRY

  (Laughing softly)

  You can open your eyes now.

  TIGER LILIES

  Rrrrr-RRRRR—RRRRRRR.

  ME

  Huh?

  GYM EXIT SIGN

  Bzzzz. . . . Bzzzz. . . . Bzzzz. . . .

  FRY

  Open your eyes. What do you see?

  ME

  Huh?

  GYM EXIT SIGN

  Bzzzz. . . . Bzzzz. . . .

  FRY

  Let’s do that again.

  TIGER LILIES

  RRRRRR-RRRRRRRRRR.

  That night was the start of something I never expected—a love life. Not only had no guy ever kissed me, no guy had ever walked me home (which Fry did, after a few more kisses, when it finally dawned on him that I’d lost both the power of speech and my inner GPS). No guy had ever called me hot, and in fact, no guy had ever even called me. (Which Fry did, the very next night. And the next. And the next after that.) I wasn’t sure “love” was the word for what he made me feel. But then, I wasn’t sure of anything when I was around Fry.

  It’s not that I didn’t know any boys. But my friends and I had always gone to dinner or to the movies in one big herd, the same way we went to dances and parties. It got so when I told my mother or Aunt Jocelyn I was going out, they didn’t even ask where or with whom. They knew: Alicia and Thea and Eli and George and Wanda and Marcia and Brett.

  My mother called us the Pack; Wanda usually referred to us as the Chosen; and Eli, more realistic in terms of our social standing at school, preferred the Untouchables. The popular kids didn’t know we existed, which was fine with us. “It makes them feel better to pretend we’re not here,” Eli explained. “That way, they don’t have to stretch.”

  Since Fry, though, everything was different; all bets were off. Suddenly, nonsensically, I was “dating.” Not just anyone, but a magnificent, dreamy specimen of the Upper Caste: a Popular Guy. It was like landing a role I hadn’t even read for. I kept wondering if there hadn’t been a mistake, if somewhere in another dimension, a popular girl was waiting for the boy who was supposed to be hers. She must have wondered, that poor thing, why she’d suddenly become invisible to all her sparkly, wrinkle-free girlfriends; why they were rushing past her in the halls and cornering me, instead, to ask what kind of lip balm I used. Or whether I had time to “approve” the playlist for their next party. Can you imagine what that felt like? Not really. Not unless you’ve won the Powerball. And the Mega Millions. Twice each.

  I started making excuses to my friends, and went out with Fry instead. It took a couple of weeks before Mom caught on that there were just two of us at the movies now. And that the movies were usually at Fry’s house, if his mother was still at work. We didn’t watch foreign films like my friends and I did, and we didn’t talk about them afterward. Mostly, we lay beside each other in the light from the TV while Fry tried to take my clothes off. We turned the sound down so the only dialogue was Fry saying yes and me saying no. Because, even though being within lip’s reach of my fairy-tale boyfriend felt more exciting than almost anything I’d ever done, I always had a third voice, a much louder one, in my head: Let that be a lesson, Sarah.

  So far, my mother’s voice was winning. You know what they say about the squeaky wheel. A yelling wheel doesn’t even give you time to think. You just do what it says. And frankly? That was a lot easier than wondering whether, once he’d gotten what he was begging for, I’d join the ranks of all those girls Fry didn’t even talk to after he’d dumped them. According to Whale Point legend, they were legion. But according to Fry, I was different. “You’re like this tricky wave,” he told me on our second date. “If you catch it right, it takes you places you’ve never been.” (Did I mention the prince liked surfing even more than pool or beer? And that when he wasn’t riding waves, he was talking about them?)

  When she finally figured things out, my mother made Fry pick me up at the door. She let him stand outside under the bug light, grilling him with questions straight out of a black-and-white sitcom. She used standards like “Where will you go after the movie?” or “Are parents going to be at this party?”

  Fry always came to the door by himself, so my mother never guessed how little time we actually spent alone. She would have felt much better knowing that Hector Losada was usually waiting for us, curbside, in his car. Most people called Fry’s best friend and head groupie H, and more often than not, it was the three of us—H, Fry, and me—who did things together after school and even on weekends. We formed a new, condensed Pack, less inclined to vintage clothes and old novels, and more drawn to designer sneakers and pool. I can’t say I found H’s constant need to prove how much macho and Latin suave could be packed into one short, skinny seventeen-year-old very convincing. Or that I liked the way he always took Fry’s side against me in any argument. But he was a senior and he had a car (a junkyard special, but still). He was, quite simply, part of the package. If I wanted Fry, then H came with him.

  H probably felt the same way about me: In order to get his Fry fix, soaking up his friend’s every word, chuckling low and slow so he slid right under Mr. Cool’s easy, open laugh, he had to put up with me. I guess that’s why I used to catch him looking at me sideways, why he went all quiet when I spoke, as if he were trying to figure out how I’d happened, what made me special enough for his hero.

  But if Hector Losada clung to his jefe like Velcro, I’m ashamed to admit that once Fry and I were a thing, I let my old friends slip away. It wasn’t something that happened all at once. I mean, I didn’t wake up one day and decide to dump the Untouchables. It was more like when you find a new street that cuts right to the beach. Gradually you forget how to get there any other way. Sure, you remember you used to walk by an open field, and there was a stray cat that always followed you for blocks. But the new road is quicker and faster, and the sun and the dunes can’t wait.

  It was sometime in March when Wanda, my used-to-be best friend and conspirator, cornered me in the girls’ room at school. It was probably the only place she could find me without the crowd that hung out around Fry, and if it was a peculiar spot to have a reunion, well, Wanda always operated from her heart, not her head. That’s just what she’d done the one and only time I tried to mix my old friends with my new ones. You’d think I’d know better, right? But I actually introduced her to H because he said she was hot. Which was when, in front of Fry’s whole crew, she turned down the chance to go to a concert with us. She told H she didn’t like rock, and why didn’t
we all go to a Kabuki ballet, instead? A freaking Kabuki freaking ballet.

  The girls who’d been eating lunch with us looked at her, silent for once. They just sat there, their fake lashes blinking and their glossy lips parted in astonishment. Or confusion. “What’s Caboosey?” one asked.

  That had been only a few months ago, but already my former sidekick looked different to me—standing in the middle of that ammonia-drenched bathroom, wearing striped suspenders she must have found at the PTA thrift shop, Wanda seemed delicate and out of place. She was someone who’d guarded my secrets once, secrets that felt a little immature and a lot inconsequential next to the sweet rush of lying close to Fry in the dark.

  “We’ve missed you at homework theater.” Wanda got right to the point, just the way we always had. We’d never done the “How are you?” or “What’s new?” thing, but always rushed, like bats with radar, straight to what mattered.

  I pictured my old friends acting out quadratic equations and world history, imagined them laughing helplessly at jokes that Fry and H couldn’t get and wouldn’t want to. “Sorry,” I told her. “I’ve been really busy.”

  “I know.” And of course, she did. She knew who was with me all the time now, who had taken over my life. And why. After all, if you’d been working in the kitchen with the palace servants, how often would you visit them after you married the prince? Oh, sure, maybe you’d climb down those stairs into the warmth and the gossip a few times, but after a while? Your visits would get shorter, and you’d go less often. And pretty soon? Well, there’s so much to do when you’re helping to run a castle.

  “It’s my birthday Friday.”

  I felt a rush of something. Was it guilt? I had the date circled somewhere. With a heart around it.

  “We’re celebrating at the cove.” Wanda didn’t invite me, she just assumed I’d be there. She shrugged a long coil of red hair off her shoulder, smiled at me, open, waiting. As if we always met in the girls’ room. As if I hadn’t stopped calling her back, and didn’t walk right by her in the halls without waving.