Girl Who Read the Stars

by Skylar Dorset

  “See?” says Mother as she leads Mom from my room. “It’s okay.” Mother closes the door, but I can still hear her murmuring to Mom as they walk down the hall together.

  I stay still for a long time, not doing anything. I’m not even thinking. My mind feels blank, wiped clean by everything that happened. Eventually, after a long time, I pull my knees up, wrapping my arms around them and pressing my face against them. I am breathing in short, tight little gasps, although I am not quite crying, and I try to catch oxygen into my lungs, to get a three-part breath going, to find my shanti.

  It isn’t working.

  Part of me wishes I could call Trow, but he doesn’t have a cell phone. Or so he says. And I can’t even be bothered to tease out whether or not he’s telling me the truth, because the other part of me—the larger part of me at the moment—is thinking that I would gladly never see Trow again if it would help my mom not do that again.

  CHAPTER 7

  In the morning, I twist my hair into a thousand different little poking bits all over my head, gazing in the cracked mirror to accomplish it. There is a knock on the door, gentle and hesitant, and I take a deep breath and call, “Come in!”

  Mom opens the door. She is holding a plate on which rest two pieces of the special free-of-everything-that-might-possibly-harm-you bread she buys, toasted and slathered with jelly. For my mom to put jelly on her special bread means that this is a peace offering of the most major kind she can muster.

  “Hi,” she says and smiles brightly, and I can tell she wants to pretend that nothing happened last night.

  I look at the mirror, whose crack definitively says otherwise. But all I say in response is, “Hi.” I want her to feel better. I want her to be better.

  “Made you toast,” she says unnecessarily and puts the plate on my dresser.

  “Thanks,” I say, and then, to make her happy, I take a huge bite, even though I’m not the least bit hungry.

  “I thought you might want to teach the lunchtime meditation class,” she offers. “I know you love that class.”

  I stare at her. And then I say, “What?”

  “You’re the best meditator I’ve ever seen,” she says and gives me a proud, beaming smile.

  “Right,” I say, too confused to even care about that. “Sure. But I can’t teach the lunchtime meditation class.”

  “Why not?” she says, her face falling.

  I feel like one of us is going insane, and actually it’s possible it could be me, because nothing would surprise me right now. “Because I’ll be in school,” I point out very carefully.

  Her face immediately hardens. “You’re not going to school.”

  “I…” I don’t know what to make of this. “Okay. Why?”

  “Because school is where you see him,” she spits at me.

  I stare at her in disbelief. “Mom,” I manage, “I don’t understand what he did to you that—”

  “I don’t understand what you don’t understand!” she shouts at me. “I have worked so hard to keep you safe, and now you are really going to walk right into the danger?”

  I am bewildered. “What danger? Mom, he’s perfectly safe. We never even leave the school; we’re surrounded by supervision at all times. What do you really think he could do to me in that situation?”

  “I’ll tell you exactly what he could do to you! All the things that the stars have been saying!”

  “Mom, the stars don’t ‘say’ anything!” I yell, growing frustrated. “They’re just stars.”

  “I know you don’t believe that. I know you’ve seen them dancing.”

  I have. It’s true. I can’t deny that. “But, Mom, that doesn’t mean anything. That’s just feelings. That’s not the future. Nothing can really tell us the future; isn’t that what you always say? Because there are too many variables? And the stars haven’t been making sense for me for a while now. They’re not saying anything.”

  “They’re saying everything. And every step you take down this path has them saying less and less, until there will be one constellation left, and it cannot be. All the variables will disappear, and the stars will have one thing to say, over and over and over and over.”

  “Mom,” I plead, terrified by how little sense she is making, “please, listen to me. It doesn’t—”

  “You need to listen to me. Because you don’t understand, and I do.”

  “You understand what the stars are saying?”

  “I always have. It has always been my talent, always been my way. But you are the one who will really see, and I cannot let that happen. I will not let that happen.”

  “Mom—”

  “You’re not going to school,” she says, and then she marches out of my room and slams the door shut.

  This is ridiculous, I think. I walk over to the door, calling for her, and I close my hand over the doorknob…and it doesn’t move. The door is…locked. But that’s impossible. This door doesn’t have a lock. It’s never had a lock. I jiggle the doorknob, astonished, but it is clear to me that somehow, someway, my mom has managed to lock the door.

  What the hell?

  “Mom!” I shout, fighting with the doorknob. “Let me out!” There is no response, so I bang on the door, bringing the flat of my hand down on it. “Mom! Seriously, let me out!” Nothing. I make a frustrated noise and say, “I’ll stop seeing him, okay? If it makes you that unhappy, I’ll stop seeing him at lunchtime. That’s all it was, anyway. It was just lunchtime with him. It wasn’t anything major. So you don’t need to be nervous about this. You don’t need to be overreacting. I’ll…” I can hear nothing beyond the door, certainly not my mother responding to my entreaties in any way. “Damn it,” I mutter, and slide down to the floor with my back against the door.

  She has locked an unlockable door. What the hell am I supposed to do now?

  • • •

  My mom thinks I’m the best at meditating, but it’s completely failing me this morning. First I call Mother, because surely she will come and save me from this insanity. But she doesn’t pick up her phone. Figures. She must be in court. I call her office, and the receptionist just says, “She’s not in. Can I take a message?” I want to demand details, but they seldom give details because of confidentiality issues and I’m sure they’re not going to be convinced I should be told secret client information because I’ve been locked in my bedroom. I make a noise of frustration and say, “Can you tell her to call Merrow when she gets in?”

  Then I sit in my room and stare at my cracked mirror. I wish Trow had a cell phone. I wish I had other friends I could call for help. This is probably why people have friends, isn’t it? So that they can call for help if they get locked up by their suddenly irrational moms? For the first time, I feel a real kinship with all those people at school I hear complaining about their parents. If their parents are behaving like this all the time, no wonder they’re so frustrated and annoyed.

  I try to call for Mom again, but there is still no answer. Why is she so incredibly good at being stubborn right now? I wonder suddenly if she left for yoga and peer out my window, but I can’t quite get the right angle to see the street where she parked her car. Still feeling helpless, I sit on my bed and try to focus on a three-part breath. I try to empty my lungs and with them my mind, but it’s not working; my brain keeps circling stubbornly around its sense of panic. I at least wish it were night so I could read the stars. That might make me feel a little calmer, more in control. The stars’ dance is ancient to me, ageless, has kept me company for longer than I can remember. But I don’t have stars or tarot cards or salt—none of the things I’ve been taught to use to give me a false feeling of control over my future.

  Hours tick by, and finally I decide this is weird. I mean, not that it’s ever been normal, but this is even weirder. Hours she’s left me up here, no contact at all, not even a question about whether or not I want l
unch. Is she just going to starve me?

  I try the door again. Still locked. It just doesn’t make sense. My mom is so easygoing, so calm and centered and shanti. She must have really lost her mind. Not as some kind of figure of speech like people use all the time. She must have really lost her mind.

  I blink away tears. Now is not the time to start crying over this. Now is the time to start planning a course of action. And I’m the one who has to do it. I don’t have anything around me to even pretend to tell me how to do it. I sit on my window seat and consider things logically. Other people come up with plans all the time. Plans that work. I ignore my personal history of failed military tactics and tell myself that this time I can come up with something effective that will work.

  The first thing I do, of course, is think about Mother, because it would be preferable if she could come up with the plan. She hasn’t called me back yet. She must be really busy, and I probably didn’t leave an urgent enough message to get my point across. That’s my fault, I know. I call her cell and get voice mail again. I call her office again. Still not in. I leave another message. Then I make a noise of frustration and resist the urge to throw the phone out the window. That’s not going to help at all.

  But I pause now, thinking. Out the window.

  I’ve never escaped out my bedroom window before. Then again, I’ve never had to. Desperate times call for desperate measures. I push open my window and my screen, and I consider. The tree is right there, and it looks sturdy enough. I am by no means a tree expert. In fact, I have never climbed one before, ever. But other people manage to do it all the time, I think. Well. In books and movies they do. I think.

  It seems a little bit reckless and a little bit overdramatic to climb out of my bedroom window, onto a tree branch, and down to the ground. But what the hell—my mom started it. She’s the one being reckless and overdramatic. If I fall and break my leg, it’ll be her fault. And I don’t think it would be anything worse than a broken leg. I glance at the distance to the ground. Hopefully. If I fall, I’ll just have to tuck and roll. That’s what they say to do if you jump out of a moving car, right? And surely this would be similar.

  Or is tuck and roll what they used to tell people to do in the event of a nuclear bomb during the Cold War?

  Never mind. Too much thinking. I pull on an extra fleece against the nippy air and edge my way out onto the tree branch. It doesn’t break. I don’t plummet to my death. Good sign, I decide, and take a three-part breath and keep going.

  It feels like it takes me forever to make it down to the ground, but eventually I get there. Well, I tumble softly down onto it, but let’s pretend that it was a super graceful exercise and that I’m a natural at climbing trees. I am dusty and my hands are scraped up, but I’m all in one piece.

  I consider what to do now and decide to escape before I can attract Mom’s attention and further ire. I’ll go to Mother’s office, and I’ll just wait there until she shows up, and then she and I can handle all of this together.

  • • •

  It is colder outside than I had anticipated. The fleece helps, but the air still bites sharply into me as I cross the river through the middle of the city into Providence’s financial center. The city is small, luckily, and the entire walk takes me only about twenty minutes.

  I’ve only been to Mother’s office a couple of times before and only gone inside once. Usually we just wait for her to duck out, so that we can get to some event somewhere that we are inevitably late for since we’re always running late because Mom says that she doesn’t keep the right kind of time here. Anyway, Mother says she likes to keep her work and home separated, and so for that reason, the receptionist has no idea who I am when I show up there. She smiles at me politely, but I feel like I can sense her faint judgment: Why isn’t this teenager in school? And what is she doing at a law office?

  I ask after my mother, and the response I get it is what I’d been getting on the phone.

  “She isn’t in. Can I take a message?”

  “No,” I say and try not to sound like I’m desperate. I take a deep breath and try to sound composed and perfectly normal and not like someone who just snuck out her window and then climbed a tree to get down. “I’ve been calling her. I really need to talk to her. I’ll just wait for her to get back.”

  “You can’t just sit here all day,” says the receptionist.

  “Why not?” I challenge her, because I’m starting to lose my patience now. I just want to talk to my mother and have her take some of this responsibility.

  “Because this is a law office.”

  “Right, and this is a waiting room, so I’m just going to wait.”

  I see her look up at my rainbow-colored hair, and I frown, annoyed at being judged like that.

  “I’m not going to cause any problems.”

  “Perhaps if you could tell me what this is about, one of the other lawyers could see you.”

  “It’s personal,” I say primly. “I just need to talk to my mother, whenever she gets back.”

  “Your mother.” The receptionist blinks at me, and I can see her trying to resolve the way I look with the way my mother looks. And I don’t just mean the fact that my mother is Latina.

  “I’m adopted,” I say, which I find generally makes people accept pretty much everything.

  “But your mother’s not here—”

  “I know. I’m just going to wait—”

  “No, she never came in today. She didn’t call, and that’s not like her, but we assumed she was sick and stayed home or something. We haven’t been able to get her to answer her cell phone. Did you check for her at home?”

  I stare at the receptionist, and it’s as if someone’s opened a door somewhere and a cold, brisk wind has staggered its way in. I feel it slam into me icily, unapologetically. How can my mother not be here? Is my mother at home? And if my mother is at home, why didn’t she intervene in the complete insanity that was going on this morning?

  I don’t tell the receptionist any of this. I instinctively hold it in. I don’t know what will happen if I tell her. I’m so terrified that my mind won’t think beyond Pretend nothing is wrong and get out of this office.

  I back slowly away from the desk, saying, “Home. Okay. I’ll try her there.”

  The receptionist watches me with a combination of concern and confusion. I try a stupid little wave, feeling like an idiot, and walk out of the office and over to the elevator. I press the button and wait for it and look around me, feeling like I’m being watched, like everyone is looking at me, knowing that I am having the craziest, scariest day.

  The elevator comes with a ding that is echoed by bells chiming elsewhere in the building. I hear them distantly, from a long way off, and they transfix me for a second. I stand suspended in the act of crossing the threshold into the elevator, and I look around me for the little bells that I can hear, momentarily forgetting Mom and Mother and every other thing that has happened.

  I shake my head, realizing suddenly that I have been standing in front of the elevator door long enough for it to be buzzing angrily at me because I’m preventing it from closing. How long has that been going on? I step into the elevator and hit the button for the ground floor and try not to feel like I might be going crazy.

  CHAPTER 8

  Once on the street, I consider my next move. I am still trying to make myself be calm, shying away from anything terrible. I am overreacting to all of this, I tell myself. This isn’t as strange as it seems.

  I walk to Mom’s yoga studio, doing three-part breaths the whole way, emptying my mind, letting all of my worried thoughts fly away. I don’t know what I’m going to do when I get to the yoga studio, but I don’t let myself think about it. Making a plan would be acknowledging that there are terrifying things happening that I need a plan to deal with, and I can’t acknowledge that. It’s possible this is why I’m so bad at p
lans.

  When I get to the yoga studio, it’s dark and shuttered. There isn’t even a sign explaining this unexpected closure. There’s just no one there.

  And this makes total sense. I had no evidence Mom went to work today. Mother didn’t even go to work today. Everyone just went crazy and locked me in an unlockable room and ignored my pleas for help. And I had walked to the yoga studio thinking I would get there and Mom would be there and…and what? I’d, like, just offer to teach a class or something? Like somehow it would turn out that this entire situation was just a horrible, terrible…dream? Hallucination? Something not real.

  Good plan, Merrow, I mock myself. Really super terrific plan.

  I press myself against the door of the yoga studio and breathe raggedly and tell myself not to fall apart. What good would that do anyone?

  A man walking by peers at me and says, “Are you okay?”

  “Fine,” I snap quickly and make myself start walking away, looking down and hunching my shoulders so as not to invite further inquiry.

  I feel like the man is watching me go. I feel like everyone around me is watching me. I feel like the world is flickering at the corner of my vision, like if I’m not careful, I’ll fall sideways into the world with the dancing stars, a world that had not prepared me for this and seems suddenly more sensible than anything going on here. I feel almost dizzy, everything around me tipping and tilting, and I do the only thing I can think of to do: I run.

  • • •

  I find myself at the high school without ever having made a conscious decision to go there. I dash up to the building and stop and double over, clutching at a stitch in my side, gasping for breath.

  And then I stop to consider. I can’t just walk into the building. And say what? I wish my mom had left me with the tarot cards. I could have dealt them to see if they would magically tell me what I am supposed to say or do here. What good is telling me I can tell the future if I’m still able to end up in this situation?