Starlight Nights

by Stacey Kade

  I flinch, hearing my mother’s words out of her mouth. “Zinn, that’s not true. And even if it was, you need to take care of yourself first.” She’s a freaking freshman in high school. She should be worried about making the show choir or getting good grades. Not getting work to bring in money.

  Though that’s exactly what I was doing at her age. She’s a kid. I was a kid. I can see it so clearly now, in a way I couldn’t when I was her age. No wonder Eric was always pushing food in my direction the first couple of years on Starlight.

  If I stay and keep working, then Zinn wouldn’t have to worry about anything other than being a teenager. At least for a couple years. Maybe that’s the way it should be.

  Zinn shakes her head. “It’s all right.” She reaches over the edge of the bed to pull a bottle of water from what looks to be a stash hiding behind the dust ruffle. “If I drink enough water, it makes it stop enough so I can sleep.”

  Oh, God. The worst part is I recognize that trick as one I’ve used. But it seems so much worse to hear about it from Zinn, in that simple, experienced tone. I used to spoon baby food—all organic and homemade, of course—into her mouth. She loved squash, hated carrots. Always ended up with those in her hair.

  I don’t know how to fix this, how to fix any of this. I’m not sure if I can.

  12

  ERIC

  The alarm on my phone beeps in the pre-dawn hours, startling me, and I fumble across the kitchen table, past the various piles of paper and my tablet, to shut it off before it wakes Katie. I left the alarm set even though I’ve been awake for hours—just in case. I can’t afford to be late, not today.

  Removing my glasses, I drop them on the pages in front of me and scrub my hands over my face.

  I’ve gone over everything. The budget, schedules, location reports, emails, contracts, invoices, permits. It’s all as ready as I can make it. But I’m sure I’m missing something; I just don’t know what. And my dad’s words won’t stop playing in my head: You’re going to embarrass yourself. I’m just trying to save you from that.

  “Shit,” I mutter.

  Katie appears in the doorway to the kitchen, Bitsy cradled against her. “Hey.”

  “Morning.” I straighten up, the too-tight muscles between my shoulder blades protesting.

  “You look like you need an assistant,” she says, edging closer. Bitsy scrambles against Katie, her nails scraping against the silk of Katie’s robe as she tries to get to me. For whatever reason, this crazy dog prefers me, the guy who is always almost stepping on her and who feeds her leftover potato chips and the dregs of my ice cream, instead of the person who can actually keep her whole and alive and healthy.

  “I need about three of them,” I admit. Then I frown at the piles of crumpled paper. “And possibly a filing cabinet. Why the hell isn’t everything digital by now?”

  Katie hands a squirming Bitsy to me, and Bitsy promptly wiggles free to plop herself in my lap, turning in circles until she’s curled up in the space between my stomach and my hip.

  “You slept on the couch last night,” Katie says, taking down a coffee mug from the cabinet. Her back is to me, so I can’t see her expression, but I can feel the tension in her, in the room.

  “I fell asleep on the couch,” I say. “There’s a difference.”

  “Is there?” She holds up a second coffee mug in question.

  I pick up my mug from last night, the cold greasy remains sloshing within, and make a face. “Yeah, thanks,” I say. “It wasn’t intentional,” I continue, picking up the thread of the conversation. “That’s the difference. I couldn’t sleep, so I didn’t want to keep you awake.”

  “I wouldn’t have minded,” she says quietly, pouring coffee into the mugs.

  “I would,” I point out. “You have lives to save today. Surgeries to perform. Anal glands to express, whatever that means. You need to be well rested.”

  She snorts with laughter. “Thank you.”

  “I mean, I don’t know exactly what those are, but if I had them, I would not want my doctor to be sleep-deprived.”

  Turning, Katie shakes her head at me in amused exasperation and hands me a mug before sitting across from me with her own.

  “I wanted to say I’m sorry about last night,” she begins.

  “You don’t have anything to be sorry for.” Except possibly not believing me when I tried to tell her about my dad.

  “I shouldn’t have pushed you into having dinner with him,” she says.

  “It’s okay,” I say. And I’m trying for it to be. There are bumps in the road with every relationship, right? Not that I would know from experience. This is my longest monogamous … anything.

  Besides, Katie was genuinely trying to do what she thought was best for our future, and that’s what matters. “You didn’t know,” I add. Now she does, though, and that’s actually what’s probably for the best.

  She’s quiet for a long moment, studying the rim of her coffee mug. Then she says, “Have you…” She hesitates. “Are you considering his offer?”

  I freeze, coffee mug halfway to my mouth. “What?” In my lap, Bitsy makes a quiet grumbling noise, likely in response to the sudden rigidity in my posture.

  Katie lifts her hand in surrender. “Just hang on,” she says. “Before you lose your mind, I have a point.”

  I raise my eyebrows.

  “Look, you’ve always said this is just a place to start. You want to build, you want to grow. You may not like your dad, but working with the resources he has might be a smart move,” she says. “If you’re sure you want to go through with this…”

  “Instead of leaving everything behind and becoming a real estate broker?” I ask, more sharply than I meant to.

  Her cheeks flush. “All I’m saying is, why start from scratch when you don’t have to? You can get to where you want to be that much faster. Use him, use what he’s offering.”

  And never make anything that’s actually mine, always knowing that my dad can claim a hand in its success or ride my ass that much harder if it fails? No, thanks.

  “Are you worried about money?” I ask. “Because everything is going to be fine, and I can always—”

  “No! Of course not,” she says, reaching out for my hand, and I let her take it, reluctantly. I’m too tired for this conversation. I can feel irrational irritation rising up, eroding my patience, and I work to stuff it back down. I’m only here because of Katie, because she believed in me enough to push me.

  “I just want you to consider whether or not you’re making this decision for the right reason. Forget your dad, forget his agenda. What about what you want? What about your agenda?” She squeezes my fingers, her gaze anxious but warm with affection. “Does this get you closer to your goals?”

  I get what she’s saying, but that just makes it clearer that she doesn’t understand. It kind of feels more like she wants me to do whatever I need to get this out of my system, to succeed or fail on a faster timeframe so we can get on with our real life, whatever that looks like.

  But to be fair to her, I’m not sure I entirely understood what I wanted until last night. Because it’s not just about creating a great show, it’s about doing it my way and without my dad’s interference. Success or failure, it will be mine to bear alone. And yeah, maybe it makes me petty or stupidly stubborn to turn down what he’s offering, to take the bigger risk, but that’s the only way any of this means anything.

  “Listen, I understand what you’re saying, but it’s not that simple. I need to do this without him. That part is important to me.”

  Her smile dims slightly. “Are you sure? I just feel like maybe there are … other factors affecting your decision.”

  I frown, gathering up my papers and stuffing them back into folders. I really need a better system. “Like what?” A more-than-twenty-year history of my dad acting like a douche seems like more than enough.

  “Like Calista?”

  I stop and stare at her. “Are you serious? She has nothin
g to do with this.”

  “You weren’t telling your dad no last night until he brought up recasting,” Katie points out.

  “That doesn’t mean I said no because of Calista!” Frustrated, I start to stand and pause long enough to pick Bitsy up off my lap before she falls. This dog. “That just happened to be the last thing he said before it finally dawned on me that I didn’t have to listen to his particular brand of bullshit anymore.”

  “Okay, okay, I’m sorry,” she says, holding up her hands. “I didn’t mean to upset you. I just had to ask.” She smiles, but the edges of her mouth are trembling. “I don’t think you realize how different you are with her. How you guys look at each other.”

  I sigh. “I told you—”

  “Family, I know. But sometimes it’s easier for other people to see what you can’t, and—”

  “People always see what’s not there with us. They have from the beginning.” I clench my jaw and then force myself to let go when I hear my teeth squeaking from the pressure. “We’re not like that.”

  “Not anymore?” Katie presses.

  I relent. “There might have been a moment for it, once a long time ago. But no, we’re past that.” The memory of Callie’s expression yesterday nags at me, her eyes wide with surprise and hurt. Not so far in the past for her, then, maybe. But that means nothing. It doesn’t change anything. It can’t.

  Katie nods, but she seems unconvinced. “You know I couldn’t do this without you,” I say, leaning over her chair to nuzzle against her neck. She smells like sleep and that lavender soap bar in the bathroom, the one I got in trouble for moving in the shower because it dissolved. “Seriously. You saved me. I need you.”

  She pulls back, an unidentified emotion flickering across her face before it vanishes.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.” She shakes her head, and then smiles at me. “You need me, huh? How much?” she asks, wrapping her hand around the back of my neck, pulling me closer.

  “That sounds like a challenge,” I murmur.

  But then my backup alarm sounds, an old-fashioned telephone ring, loud and shrill, startling both of us and making Bitsy bark.

  Katie pats the side of my face and then pushes me away. “Time to go to work.”

  * * *

  “I can’t work like this!” Vincent shouts in my general direction, when the power flickers for the third time in the last fifteen minutes.

  It is the latest meltdown/screw up in a day that’s been full of them. Starting with the warehouse co-owner, a dude I didn’t even know existed, storming out and demanding our paperwork as soon as we rolled onto location this morning. I had it, fortunately, though it took me a few minutes to find it.

  Now I push to my feet, my knees protesting—God, maybe I am getting old—and leave my mark in search of the power problem, and hopefully, a solution.

  But before I get more than a step or two, the lights stabilize, and someone shouts, “We got it. Cheap-ass generator.”

  “Thank you,” Vincent shouts back, sarcasm dripping.

  With a sigh, I return to my mark and kneel on the concrete floor next to Calista.

  She’s lying on the ground, her eyes closed and her arm thrown over her head in a protective gesture that will do no good. Near her temple, her hair is matted with a mixture of corn syrup and food coloring, darkening the blond to a bloody red. It makes me feel a little queasy to see her like this. It’s all fake, obviously, but I have real memories of pulling Calista, bloody and broken, from a very real car accident.

  Chase hit a guard rail. We were lucky we didn’t go tumbling off the edge of the hill. That shock of the crash still reverberates through me when I let myself think about it. After I freed myself from my seatbelt with shaking hands, I climbed out the shattered back window and immediately went to the bashed-in passenger-side door. Calista, unconscious, was half-in and half-out of the window, and bleeding. So much. I have a permanent—and horrible—sense memory of the weight of her head lolling against my arm, and her blood trickling, warm and wet, down my elbow. I was afraid she was dying. Amped too much on adrenaline and panic, I wouldn’t let the EMTs take her at first once they finally arrived. In my head, it felt like letting her go, even to them, was giving up, that somehow my will was the thing keeping her alive.

  This injury, though, is part of Evie’s story. A knock to the side of Evie’s head incurred while she is attempting to stop a warehouse robbery ends up stealing her abilities. Head trauma, traumatic brain injury—it’s never made clear exactly what happened. And Jude’s interpretation of it is that it might well be Evie’s own subconscious choice to block out her superpowers, given that her family and friends only seem to value her for what she can do instead of who she is.

  “You okay?” Callie asks me quietly, opening her blue eyes to blink up at me. It startles me and sends a reflexive wave of relief through me that is part due to the reminder that she’s okay—no longer broken and unconscious—and part due just to her being here. It’s a comfort to have at least one friendly face here.

  Despite how we left things yesterday, she wasn’t angry when she arrived this morning. Alone, without Lori. I’m not sure how she pulled that off. Callie just nodded hello and went straight to work. God love her. I couldn’t take any more drama today, the first day.

  Behind me, Vincent is muttering while we reset for another take, and I brace myself for another explosion.

  “Being in charge is not like what I expected,” I say to Callie. When I used to visit sets with my dad, he would stride through, surveying everything like a king with his kingdom stretched out before him. Sometimes people would approach to say hello or to ask a question, but it was all quick, superficial stuff, more to show deference than to get a needed answer. Whoever said it’s nice to be needed must have had a severe inferiority complex. Because no one wants to be needed this much.

  “There are always hang ups, you know that,” she says reasonably. “You’re just hearing about more of them this way.”

  “And in charge of fixing them,” I say.

  “The price of power?” she asks, arching her eyebrows.

  “Yeah. I guess.” I hesitate, but then continue. Calista will, of all people, understand. “My dad made me an offer last night. He wants me to come work for him.”

  Calista pushes herself up to her elbows, the neck of Evie’s sweater falling off her shoulder, revealing pale, smooth skin and the start of several pinkish scars, and I have to look away. “Are you serious?” she asks.

  I nod.

  She narrows her eyes. “What’s the catch?”

  I point at her, triumphant. “Yes, see? Exactly.” Calista gets it. Probably because her own parental situation is just as fucked up, only in a different way. “He wants me to turn over rights to Fly Girl. He’ll rework it, recast, make it for television. He has the resources—”

  She makes a disgusted noise. “So he can turn Evie into a stripper by day and superhero by night?”

  I laugh because that’s not far from the truth. I knew she would be as protective of Evie as I am.

  “I hope you told him to fuck off,” Callie says, lying back down in position. “And if you didn’t, I’m sure Jude would.”

  I glance over my shoulder to where Jude is sitting, back behind the monitors.

  From her chair, she’s watching Vincent pace back and forth like a caged lion, and when she catches my eye, she gestures to him, not all that subtly, mouthing to me, “This fucking guy.” Then she rolls her eyes.

  Calista snorts.

  As expected, Jude and Calista bonded immediately when they met this morning during the first shooting break, though there’d been a moment right at the start that made me wonder if I would be wrong.

  Jude squinted up at Callie. “You’re taller than I thought,” she says. “Not tall, mind you. Just different than what I thought.”

  Her cheeks turning red, Callie went still, obviously expecting the critique to begin. Too tall, too fat, too old, too ine
xperienced. She’d heard it all before, mostly from her mother on various days with the rest of the Starlight cast and crew to witness it.

  I made a move to intervene, but Jude continued.

  “But then again, I’m just probably shrinking. Again.” And with that, Jude let loose with a wheezy cackle that spoke to years of smoking.

  Then she took Callie’s hand in hers. “You are the perfect Evie,” she said softly, her eyes bright with emotion. “Exactly what I pictured in my head all those years ago. I never thought that could happen. It’s like seeing her come to life right in front of me.”

  Seeing Callie’s face light up in that moment made me feel like I’d done something heroic—in optioning Fly Girl, in casting her as Evie, in introducing her to the author who meant so much to her—when really all I’d done is what I always do: what’s best for me. It just happened to be good for her, too.

  And speaking of which, I turn my attention back to Callie. “Listen, I didn’t have time this morning, but I wanted to apologize for everything yesterday. I could have … I should have handled that better.” Maybe by not springing a fiancée on her without any notice, given our rather tumultuous, though unofficial, history.

  She stiffens before shrugging. “It’s fine. I was just … surprised.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I think old feelings sometimes just hang on out of habit,” she says. “That’s all.”

  Her words leave an uncomfortable feeling in my gut.

  “It was the first time I’d seen you in years. Of course things are going to be different. I just hadn’t … processed that yet. That’s all it was.” Her gaze flicks past me to fix on a point on the warehouse ceiling above.

  “Right,” I say. “Good.” Though it doesn’t feel good or right. “And I’m sorry for all that stuff I said about you and your mom. I shouldn’t have—”

  Calista focuses on me again. “Actually, I wanted to talk to you about something,” she says, sitting up. Her voice is hushed, and she’s picking at the edge of her thumbnail with her index finger—the portrait of a nervous Callie. Her tension feels contagious.