Of Scars and Stardust Read online

  Mom’s watery eyes floated into consciousness. “You have to go, Claire,” her voice echoed. In my mind, she smoothed back the hair hanging over my eyes. “You’re not coping.”

  “But I have to find the wolves,” I’d told her, clutching a piece of paper in my fist.

  Her mouth twisted into a frown. “No, honey, you don’t.” She paused, chewing on her lips as if she were chewing on her thoughts. “If anything, you have to get away from them.”

  I swallowed the puke at the back of my throat and opened my eyes. The same slip of paper lay across my chest now, its edges yellow and curling. The muted walls wobbled around me.

  I tossed the paper to the side and rolled off my bed. My fingers slid through dust and darkness under it until they reached an empty liquor bottle. I shoved it into the corner with a clink. And then I grabbed the box.

  It was an old Macy’s box from a sweater Aunt Sharon had gotten me two years ago. It was the first thing she’d bought me after my parents shipped me off to New York. I ran my fingers over the red star, thinking it didn’t really matter where the sweater had come from if it never fit anyway.

  I opened the lid and peeled back the tissue paper. A bunch of shiny, useless things looked up at me. I picked up a beaded flower ring that I’d bought at a shop in SoHo. I tried to slip it on my finger, but it was too small. The tissue paper crinkled as it landed back in the box.

  My hand brushed the cool metal of a compact nestled between a headband and a googly-eyed giraffe keychain. I scooped it into my palm and clicked it open.

  “Holy hell,” I breathed. I leaned in. My dark, sunken eyes stared back at me. I pulled at the clumps of mascara stuck to my lashes. I blinked, and the skin under my eyes fluttered. “You look like shit,” I said, snapping the compact shut.

  I threw myself back onto my bed and unfolded the slip of paper. Ella had pressed it into my palm just before I was forced to pack my bags and get out of Amble. I don’t know why I did this, really; I always used Ella’s loopy handwriting as punishment, especially after a night raiding Danny’s parents’ liquor cabinet. My eyes scanned the only sentence on the page. I made myself read it. Twice.

  I ran my finger over the words. Every loop, each heart-dotted letter: it all made my stomach twist. But with what, I wasn’t sure. Every time I looked at Ella’s note, it killed me to think that her words were confined to paper and pink glitter pen, so much so that I thought more than once about taking Danny’s matches to it. But bubbling under those letters was something else—desperation, maybe? This note was the only thing that told me the wolves were real.

  Which meant I was exactly one slip of paper and four words away from insanity.

  seven

  Aunt Sharon looked startlingly like Mom, especially when she was angry. They both had this thing where they pinched the bridge of their nose and kind of rocked in a chair, like if they kept moving, whatever had rattled them wouldn’t be able to catch on.

  But the thing was, in the two years I’d lived with her, I’d seen her do the whole rocking thing way more than I ever saw Mom do it back in Amble.

  “Just go to school, Claire.” She let go of her nose. Her skin was pink and raw between her eyebrows. “That’s all I ask. That’s all your parents ask. Just graduate. One more year.”

  I blinked up at her from over my cereal bowl. “I do go to school.”

  Aunt Sharon got up from the couch and shuffled through a stack of week-old mail. She pulled out a letter on cream-colored stationery with the Poller Academy seal bent up in the corner and tossed it at me. “You go to school when you feel like it.”

  This was very, very true.

  “Claire, listen.” She sighed, and her eyes got all soft and watery and I knew the worst of it was over. She put both hands on my shoulders just like I use to do to Ella when I really wanted her to listen to me. “You’re so smart. And so creative! What happened to making dresses, going to design school at NYU? Don’t you still want those things?” Her eyes scanned my face, and the wrinkles around them tightened. “What happened to that girl who used to want things?”

  I stared into my cereal bowl and pushed around my Cheerios. I still did want things. They just weren’t the same things anymore.

  “I’m going to school today.” I grabbed my bowl and shoved it under the faucet, hoping the running water would drown out her withering sighs. But it didn’t matter if I couldn’t hear her; I could feel her watching. I turned around and pressed a smile to my face. “I swear, I’m going. I want to drop by that fabric store on 37th after school, anyway.”

  This seemed to make her happy enough to believe me. A smile spread across her face and her shoulders relaxed. “Good girl. Do you need some money?” She reached for her purse and I didn’t say no. The truth was, I never really needed money; Danny always bought our liquor and anything else he could get his hands on. But Aunt Sharon had more than enough money from her gallery art to pay for our apartment off the Hudson, not to mention half of my tuition to Poller. So what was the point in saying no?

  “Thanks,” I said as she handed me a fifty-dollar bill. “I can get a lot of fabric with this.” I forced the muscles in my mouth to hitch up and show some teeth. I’d figured out that this was the kind of smile everyone liked, the one with teeth. It was the one Mom and Dad liked to see in the pictures Aunt Sharon emailed them, to show them that I was happy and safe and sane. I imagined Mom patting Dad on the back and saying, “See, she looks so happy. It was for the best to send her there, Mike.” But really, if they looked a little closer, they’d see that smiles are just muscles and that they can easily be faked. It’s what’s behind the eyes that’s real.

  I started down the hallway toward the closet to grab my backpack, even though the only things inside of it were a pack of gum and a pen that had exploded inside the front pocket a week ago. I was halfway out the door when Aunt Sharon said, “Hey Claire?”

  I poked my head back inside. “Yeah?”

  “What kind of fabric are you going to get? I really need a new dress.” She was smiling behind her sketchbook, but I knew better. She was still leery, still hoping that I’d prove her wrong and come back with an armful of fabric and an actual smile on my face.

  “I’m thinking eyelet,” I said, and I didn’t even bother to fake smile. Then I stepped out the door and into Manhattan without looking back.

  Sometimes I had to remind myself that Ella was not actually dead. That she was alive on the planet, breathing the same oxygen I was. And sometimes I thought that maybe she’d actually sucked in the exact same gasp of air I’d recycled a week or a month or a year before, and that maybe we still shared that one little breath. But I mostly just thought things like that after I’d had too much to drink.

  I usually reminded myself that Ella wasn’t dead on the subway ride from school to Midtown. The ride was thirteen minutes long, which turned out to be the perfect amount of time to think about someone, miss the way they used to be, and go tumbling down when you remembered that they could never be that way again.

  And that it was all your fault.

  I pinched my earlobe, trying to force down the anxiety building in my chest. My shrink had told me about that one—about squeezing your earlobes when “non-productive feelings” bubbled up. It was supposed to calm them.

  It didn’t work.

  Why did I let her go into the cornfield that night?

  Why didn’t I realize sooner that she hadn’t sifted through my jewelry box?

  I bit my lip to try to force down the sadness clotting up my throat. Ella’s purple eyelids fluttered open in my mind, her eyes empty and lost. She hadn’t remembered the days following the incident either.

  I was just starting to click into full-fledged panic mode when Willow nudged me and said, “What’s your problem, Stare-Claire?”

  Willow was always coming up with nicknames for me that rhyme. Stare-Claire was her fav
orite, though, especially when I was zoning out on the subway.

  I nudged her back. “I don’t have a problem. What’s yours?”

  “My problem is that it’s—oh, approximately 1:33 p.m. on a Wednesday, there’s an entire bag of free pot just waiting to be smoked, and we’re still three minutes away.”

  I picked at a hangnail on my thumb until it started to bleed. “It’s 1:33 p.m. on a Wednesday, and we should be in French right now.”

  “Touché, Mer-Claire. See? French like crazy.” Willow laughed, and her lip ring wiggled in her mouth. “Mer means ‘sea’ in French, in case you missed too much class to pick that one up.”

  I rolled my eyes and watched out the dank windows as 54th’s underground terminal chugged to a stop. The doors hissed and Willow practically smashed an old lady in the temple to beat her out the door.

  I let Willow work her way through the crowd and skip up the stairs two at a time, not bothering to try and keep up. I wasn’t stupid; she wasn’t my friend because she just couldn’t stay away from my optimism and sunshiny personality. She was my friend because Danny always had extra pot after a deal.

  And I didn’t even care.

  It had gotten easy, the not caring thing. It was almost too easy to skip school and ditch all my dreams of the cutting counter at the fabric store. At least I still had the fifty dollars.

  By the time I reached the top of the steps, Willow was bouncing on the balls of her purple Converse shoes and flapping her hands. “Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go.”

  “Chill,” I said as I walked past her. “He’s usually right here, up on this corner.” I weaved through the bustling streets, leading Willow to her ultimate destination.

  “There he is. Hey Danny!” Willow yelled, straight into the lens of a bald guy’s video camera. “Hey, we’re right here!”

  Danny turned and gave us a half-smile before cocking his head toward a massive building across the street. “My parents are working. We’ll go to my place.”

  He bolted across the street, his red hair glinting under the watery sun like a lit matchstick. When a taxi almost smashed into him, he just calmly held up the bag full of pot in his fist and thrust it toward the driver like some kind of brown paper stop sign. He was definitely a true New Yorker.

  Willow was the same way. One time the traffic lining Times Square was so thick that it blanketed the streets in rubber and metal, tired business men on their way home from work. Willow just bounced between the cars, humming the Harry Potter theme song to herself, even when the traffic lights flicked to green.

  I preferred to wait at crosswalks until the blinking man told me it was safe to go. And even then I still scrabbled across the street like a jittery little rodent scurrying from under a trash can lid.

  I let out a breath as we stepped onto the sidewalk and a delivery truck bumbled behind us. Danny led us up the marble steps of his apartment building, past the doorman, and into a gilded elevator that had sparrows painted on its ceiling.

  Every time I saw the sparrows, I imagined Ella saying, “Why are there birds in the elevator? Birds don’t go in elevators, duh.” And then suggesting rainbows or thunderclouds or fuzzy bear cubs or something else just as likely to not ever end up in an elevator.

  Willow grabbed the bag out of Danny’s hand the second he unlocked the door. “I’ve been waiting for this all day,” she squealed. “Where’s a lighter?”

  I curled into the corner of a leather chair that was sidled up to a window almost as big as the wall. Willow and Danny sat in chairs on either side of me, passing the joint back and forth. They didn’t even bother to ask me anymore. Danny had spent the better part of the fall semester trying to convince me that pot was ten million times better than alcohol, and that it was the best for making out and eating Cheetos and taking naps in a chair. And you didn’t even feel sick in the morning. But it smelled like the family of skunks that had nested behind Dad’s shed back in Amble, and it made them both look like they were one IQ point away from drooling on the carpet.

  They finished that joint and started working on the next, and by the time they were done with that one, my eyes were taking longer to open after every blink. And instead of seeing darkness when I closed my eyes, I saw splotches of color, like bubbles filled with reds and yellows that popped when they reached my eyelashes.

  “You feelin’ it, Claire?” All of a sudden, Danny was standing over me, blowing smoke directly into my face. “You are now,” he laughed. And the edges around his ears started to blur and wobble.

  I shrugged. The whole thing should have made me mad, but it seemed like a lot of effort. And I didn’t know what “feelin’ it” felt like, but if it meant that the lights flickered on and off like dying stars and the walls didn’t stand straight anymore, then I guessed I was.

  Willow’s eyes scanned my face, big and round like a cat’s. “Stare-Claire is totally feelin’ it.” I blinked, and her eyes were gone and there was only the window.

  Something flickered in the shadows of the kitchen.

  Something so dark it was almost black.

  And something big. Really, really big.

  It was back.

  I think if it could have, my heart would have crawled up into my head and pounded in my ears. But it was too tired, too high. It was reclining on the Lazy-Boy, eating leftover Cheetos. So it stayed.

  But the wheels slowly churning in my mind told me to freak out anyway. It’s just that my mouth wouldn’t really move to scream like it should. I imagined a pile of drool pooling on the carpet, and I burst into a giggle instead. All of a sudden I was standing up and still kind of half-giggling, and my tongue felt thick and heavy in my mouth.

  “Where’re you goin’?” Danny asked. He was lying down with his mouth hanging open, and patterns and colors from the TV splashed across his teeth.

  “Bathroom,” I mumbled. And then I used the crooked walls to lead me there.

  As soon as I stepped through the door, I couldn’t unglue my eyes from this big silver dish, shaped like a seashell, which was tucked into the corner of the countertop. The string of bulbs that hung over the sink were reflected over and over again in the smooth crevices of the dish, like strings of tiny pearls laid out to dry. It was filled with a tangle of jewelry—necklaces and hooped earrings and rings that all glittered with fat stones.

  And I giggled again as I poked my finger through Danny’s mom’s jewelry. Because it was kind of funny that pot made you notice every little thing and alcohol made you notice nothing at all.

  Then my fingers were on two round yellow stones the color of melted butter. I held them in my hand, the posts sticking into my palm.

  They stared at me.

  They stared at me like big, jeweled wolf eyes.

  Glued into the cover of a journal that came from the new stationery shop on Main.

  And then they swiveled on their posts and blinked into my palm, blinked into the pink scar that still slithered across my skin. And I swore they were whispering, whispering so loud they were almost yelling: You didn’t keep Rae’s promise. You didn’t keep her secret. Now you have your own.

  My secret. I’d hugged it so tightly to my chest for so long that my heart had been almost crushed under its weight. But now, here, I was alone in this ridiculously ornate bathroom, and my secret wanted to be spoken. Just once. I could do it. No one would hear me.

  I looked at my reflection in the mirror and tried to ignore the purple bags under my eyes. “The wolves are here, in this city,” I whispered. And then I slapped my palm over my mouth, even though it was true. The wolves were in the city—the same ones that had sliced up Ella’s face and most likely plucked Sarah Dunnard from her backyard like a spindly little weed.

  Everyone said it wasn’t possible, that the wolves couldn’t be in Manhattan. But it also didn’t seem possible that “rabid raccoons,” as the Amble Observer had reported, w
ere responsible for Ella’s stitches. Whenever I asked Aunt Sharon, or even my shrink, why Dad had told the paper it was a raccoon even after the doctors said Ella’s cuts were too “clean” to be caused by an animal, no one gave me an answer. There was no other evidence. No weapon. And when they asked Ella about the attack, she claimed the last thing she remembered that night was hugging me goodbye in the clearing.

  But then she gave me the note, her secret and mine whispered onto lined paper. And then came the shadows, the tufts of gray flitting across alleys. They’d followed me. And they weren’t going to leave me alone any time soon.

  My hand curled into a fist and I imagined the note pressed against the yellow stones. My mind ticked back to the morning they found Ella in the cornfield. I swore I could still smell the moldy rugs at the police station, the way the interrogator they brought in from Toledo stared at me until I cracked open and spilled out everything I knew about Rae’s plans.

  I threw the jewels back into the seashell dish with a clink and ran down the hall. My feet felt heavy and my eyes felt heavy and the scar in my palm burned like a fresh bite.

  I ran through the living room and Willow and Danny’s eyes followed, but they stayed silent and stoned. I threw open the door to the balcony and stepped into the dusty Manhattan skyline. I sucked in the city air, but it was the meal equivalent to popcorn: it never filled me up. It wasn’t crisp and untouched like the air that pressed between the cornstalks.

  I closed my eyes, but even from behind my eyelids, I knew they were still there.

  The howls that bounced between skyscrapers.

  Pricked ears peeking around the windowsills.

  And the yellow eyes that always, always watched. That had watched every single day since I’d found Ella.