Catch a Falling Star

by Culbertson, Kim

  After the parade, we quickly ate hamburgers at the fairgrounds while Adam signed autographs for the kids not taking advantage of the huge bouncy world they’d set up just inside the main entrance. I found myself staring out over the periphery of pine trees, my smile fixed, cement-like. I’d changed into some white shorts and a tank top so I could try out the bounce house, but mostly I stood by Adam, smiling like a zombie on Prozac.

  Every half hour or so, Adam would chug some sort of electrolyte drink that Mik would hand him. He offered me one, but I shook my head. “Make sure you stay hydrated,” he insisted, tossing an empty bottle into a nearby recycling bin. He seemed energized by the constant stream of attention, each signature zapping more life into his eyes.

  Maybe this was why so many celebrities became politicians. They were the ones who could keep up with this sort of pace, their bodies naturally porous things ready to soak up all the adoration.

  It was fifteen minutes after four when we stopped by Snow Ridge for the barbecue. It was being held in a sort of atrium by the pool, and someone had hung festive red, white, and blue bunting on all the patio tables. I had changed back into the white sundress (a little worse for its wear from the Mustang ride), but had ditched the heeled sandals for some blue flip-flops I’d borrowed from Chloe. After ten minutes, I started to ignore the cameras, angling my body away from them or making sure I was standing in shadow. After a half hour, I wandered away from Adam (and the cameras) and found myself accepting a cool drink from Mrs. Adler, who wore a chic chambray tunic and flowing white pants.

  She clinked her glass against mine. “You look lovely, dear.”

  “Hollywood’s rubbing off on me.” I took a sip of the sparkly punch.

  “Let’s hope not.” She squinted at me. “Though you do look a bit like a glazed ham.”

  “Been a long day already.” I tried to brighten my smile. How did Adam do this, always be so available to people? At the café, what they wanted was clear: their food, their coffee, a quick smile. It was a simple equation. What they wanted from Adam, well, that was something else entirely.

  Mrs. Adler and I watched Adam play a lighthearted game of Ping-Pong with Mr. Lively, who wasn’t all that lively but had sharp blue eyes and a crisp left-handed swing that seemed to come out of his otherwise lifeless body.

  “This guy’s got some skills!” Adam called to us. He had his sunglasses pushed into his hair and wore a linen shirt the color of blue sea glass. If you didn’t know this was work to him, you’d guess he was having a pretty good time. Or, maybe he was having a good time and it wasn’t just all for show? It was impossible to tell.

  “How’s your movie star?” Mrs. Adler sipped her drink through a slender straw. No doubt she’d noticed I was wilting like lettuce left overnight on the counter.

  I watched Adam, the combination of the day’s heat and too much sugar and starch lulling me into a haze. “Not at all what I thought,” I heard myself telling her.

  “None of the good ones are, dear.” She plucked a deviled egg from the platter on the snacks table and managed to eat it in three dainty bites. “Of course,” she paused, dabbing at the corners of her mouth with a star-spangled napkin, “none of the rotten ones are, either.” Then, she refilled my punch.

  At least people wouldn’t let me dehydrate.

  I asked Mik to make an unscheduled stop.

  Adam followed me out of the car. “Why’re we stopping here?”

  I pushed through the creaky iron gate of the Little Cemetery and walked him through a row of gravestones. The summer heat had settled among them like fog, but every few seconds a breeze ruffled the few flags or flowers people had left, some dry and withering, others fresh and new.

  “One of the places on our tour we never made it to.” I veered from the main path, through a row where the graves were marked with flat slabs pressed into the ground. Toward the back of the cemetery stood a wide stone marker, etched with a crescent moon. It marked the entrance to my family’s plot. Five generations of Moons.

  I crouched down next to one the color of smooth, creamy milk, my grandmother’s grave. Dad had been here already. He’d left a blue bucket dotted with stars and filled with red, white, and blue flowers.

  I touched it briefly, the smell of the red roses ripe in the air. “My grandmother loved the Fourth. Well, she loved all holidays — any reason to have people over for enormous amounts of food — but she especially loved this one. The parade, the picnics, swimming, fireworks. When you stood on her deck at night, you could see the fireworks over the fairgrounds off in the distance.” I pulled open my bag and extracted some sparklers. I pushed them into the ground and lit them, their sizzle and spark mostly lost in the bright daylight. “She loved a day that ended with fireworks.”

  Adam stood beside me. “I didn’t know you’d lost your grandmother.”

  “The month after I went to dance camp. She was actually why I started teaching the dance class at Snow Ridge in the first place. She’d just started living there my sophomore year. Had felt like her house was too much.” I felt tears pricking my eyes. “She came to every dance show I had from the time I was a Bon Bon in The Nutcracker.”

  Adam knelt and read the inscription on her headstone. ALICE MOON, mother, grandmother, lover of life. Then he stood and wrapped an arm around me, and I found myself curving into him. “How soon after she passed did you stop dancing?”

  A bubble of annoyance popped in my belly, and I eased out from under his arm. “I didn’t quit dancing because she died.” I glanced at him, trying to un-barb my voice. “You know, Mom thought that, too.”

  Adam shook his head. “Maybe you didn’t quit. Maybe you just needed a break, time to sort it all out. I mean, between Dance-Guy-the-Dream-Killer and your grandmother dying, you might still be sorting it all out.” He pushed his hands into his pockets, the sparklers reflecting in his sunglasses, almost brighter in reflection.

  A hot wind came across the cemetery, and the sky held the lazy drone of an airplane. Why hadn’t I ever considered that I was just taking a rest? “I guess I always just thought of it as quitting.” When you stop doing things, people have a way of assigning a sort of finality to them.

  Adam tucked his hands into the pockets of his shorts. “I’m not sure we ever truly quit the things we love. We might not be practicing them, but that doesn’t mean we’ve quit them. I think, sometimes, things we love need to go dormant or come out in a different form for a while.”

  The thoughtful Adam was back. Not the one who’d dashed out of the car. Here was the attentive, bring-some-pie-to-my-tree-house Adam. And he had a point. I tried to put up a wall, to shrug off his words, but the truth was, until now, I’d never thought about my dancing as anything other than something I just stopped doing. Even the classes I taught at Snow Ridge felt like something totally separate from dancing, something secondary or lesser, like I’d failed myself in some way, failed the expectations people had set up for me.

  I studied my reflections in Adam’s glasses. Then I reached out and pushed his sunglasses up onto his head, wanting to see his eyes. “Did you need a break from acting? When you went … wherever you went?” He hadn’t talked much about his rehab, about his months dealing with his drug charges, the reckless driving, the smashed-up car, only hinted at them. It was hard to believe the guy standing here surrounded by pines and headstones was that guy. The tabloid guy.

  Will the real Adam Jakes please stand up? I wanted to scream.

  He stretched his arms up over his head and turned a slow circle, taking in the green-and-stone sweep of the cemetery. “Yeah,” he finally said, lowering his sunglasses back down. “I did.” His phone buzzed. Looking at it, he groaned. “That’s Parker. He wants our ETA. But we can stay here as long as you need to.”

  The spell was broken, Adam already scrolling through his phone, disappearing, fading to black.

  I made sure the sparklers had gone out and dribbled a bit of my water bottle on them just to be sure. “It’s fine. We can go.�
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  I’d only been to Gemstone Winery once before, for a wedding. It had been a small wedding, sleek white linen and sage green, the endless lawns stretching out to a view of Little far below and pine forests beyond.

  Today, hundreds of people packed the lawns and dozens of red-white-and-blue-striped tents gave the grounds the look of a circus. As we drove up the winding graveled road to a private parking spot, I could hear a band playing even through the closed windows of the car.

  The main house of the winery was stone, wide and tall, ivy snaking its sides. We parked in a smaller version of the stone house next to a few classic cars and what looked like a white horse carriage. I had a vague memory of the bride and groom arriving in it.

  Parker met us at the car. “We need you to go around the back through the vineyard. We have photographers there.” He seemed a bit less tense than he had this morning, his face bronzed from his day at the river.

  “Did you find that spot I told you about?” I took his offered hand as he helped me out of the Range Rover.

  “I did. It was aces.” He shut my door.

  Adam and I took a stroll through the vineyards, the photographers a harmless distance away, though I could hear the cameras snapping. I pointed out the view of Little. He chatted about baseball. Parker had reminded us to only talk about safe things in case any of the reporters overheard us. From a distance, I’m sure we looked casual, happy, but I was aware of how detached I was from myself as we meandered along, like viewing my own life through a crack in a fence.

  At a small turn of the path, we came to a fountain under a trellis flowering with fuchsia blooms. Adam laced his fingers with mine, sending a warm jolt through me. I tried to listen to what he was saying, something about a trip he took to Indonesia for a futuristic film he’d shot last summer. The sweet smell of the vineyards wafted around us; the trellis bloomed brightly; I could hear the band playing on the other side of the stone house; and suddenly I felt soaked in sadness.

  Adam noticed, leaned into me a bit, and whispered, “You okay?” I could hear cameras behind us, like tiny dogs nipping at our heels.

  I nodded, hoping to shed this feeling so foreign to me. “I’m fine. Just tired.”

  “We should get you something cool to drink.” He signaled to Mik, who’d been walking a few paces behind us.

  Hydration therapy again.

  I didn’t need something cool to drink. Truth was, I was sad because none of this was real. And that was suddenly a huge problem.

  Because I really liked this guy, the version of him that broke through his cloud cover once in a while. I had expected to tolerate the tantrums of a brash, selfish movie star for a few weeks — smile, grit my teeth, and quietly count my cash, help my brother out, ease my parents’ stress. Adam wasn’t supposed to have flashes of cute and smart and interesting. He wasn’t supposed to make me feel like this. Like I could float away into the sky.

  Only in the movies, right?

  Except, I knew this wasn’t going to end well.

  Sipping the tall iced glasses of lemonade that had magically appeared, we passed under the trellis and out to the edge of the vineyard.

  “Look!” Adam pointed out across the valley. “The cemetery.”

  He was right. You could see the cemetery from here like it was a child’s model. Next to it, the funeral home looked like a matchbox. “Thanks again for stopping with me.”

  “You really know how to impress a date.” He gave my hand a squeeze. “Ghosts. Fairy Trees and dead guys. Cemeteries. Super sexy, by the way.”

  I took a breath of air. “I really love going there.”

  He gave me a funny look. “Okay, now you’re just freaking me out.”

  I laughed, feeling some of the haze lift. “To see my grandma!” I gave him a playful shove and he moved his arm around my waist. I imagined away the cameras, focused only on the way his arm felt around me. “Actually, there’s something really calming about a graveyard.”

  “If you say so, Crazy.”

  I sipped my lemonade, chewing a stray piece of ice. “Seriously, I go there and all of the stupid stuff from my life seems, well, stupid. Pointless. I mean, sooner or later, we all end up right there. So, we need to not stress out all the time. We need to know that we have a life and that is a good thing.”

  “Yes, being alive is better than being dead.”

  “You know what I mean.” Somehow, I knew he did. We stared out over the valley, and I thought about how the feeling I got at a graveyard was similar to the one I got watching the sky at night, drinking in all those stars. There were many things in this world to feel small — stars, cemeteries, oceans. They relaxed me. I liked being reminded of being small, mostly because it took the pressure off when people pushed you to be big.

  “Mr. Jakes?” One of the Mik look-alikes appeared next to us.

  “You can call me Adam.” He dropped his hand from around my waist.

  “Parker needs you both at the front of the house. We got the pictures we wanted.”

  Adam glanced down at me. “You ready?”

  And just like that, the haze returned. “Sure.”

  by nine, the sky had grown the deep color of grape juice with an illuminated rim of pale still edging the horizon. Chloe and Alien Drake had joined us for dinner. Pulled-pork sandwiches, coleslaw, plate-sized wedges of seedless watermelon, huge vats of homemade ginger ale, root beer, lemonade — all spread out on red-white-and-blue-checked tablecloths. As we loaded our plates in line, Alien Drake and I managed to joke a bit, the tension between us thawing.

  Now, he and Chloe snuggled next to each other on our blanket, eating, listening to the band play covers of songs whose only connection was that they had some derivation of the word America in them.

  As night beckoned the crowds to their blankets, the band’s singer announced one last song before the fireworks show. Into the mic, he said, “This song was a request from our special guest, Adam Jakes. It’s an original song that we wrote, and it goes out to Carter Moon. It’s called ‘Stargazer.’” His guitar hit the opening notes, the drummer keeping an even rhythm, and he belted out:

  Every night, she watches the sky.

  Every night, she wishes on a star.

  Did she know she was looking for me?

  Did she know she didn’t need to look so far?

  I squirmed a little on the blanket. He had them write a song for me? Parker hadn’t mentioned a song. I felt eyes on me from the other blankets as the song filled the air around us.

  After a minute, Adam whispered into my ear, “Do you like it?”

  I nodded, my throat closing.

  As I looked around at the people listening, believing this song was meant for me, that it was true, I was struck with how much we needed to know we were loved. We needed people to tell us, show us, remind us. I studied the stars wide above me, realizing it was because we knew how small we were that love mattered so much. Even when everything in the world pointed to the contrary, love carved out its own vast galaxy for us, made us the most important thing in it, at least to somebody. But I also knew as I listened that I didn’t want a fake song from Adam.

  I wanted a real one.

  The crowd listened around me, their heads bobbing along to the easy beat. People sneaked glances in our direction, trying not to look like they were staring. When the band finished playing, Adam gave my hand a squeeze, jumped up, and crossed the darkening lawn to the stage.

  Chloe studied me from across the blanket, her eyes wide. “You are in so much trouble.”

  “Why?”

  “You love him.”

  My chest lurched. “I don’t love him. I’ve known him for, like, five minutes. It’s taken me longer to love a sandwich. We’re not in love. We just started dating.” Chloe and Alien Drake exchanged a concerned look; they knew overacting when they saw it.

  Chloe motioned toward the bandstand. “He had a song written for you and played in front of, like, four hundred people. Who does that?”

&n
bsp; Alien Drake nodded, clearly impressed. “I’ve never done that.”

  Chloe gave his face a pat. “We know, sweetie.”

  I watched Adam laughing with the lead singer, and I chose my words carefully. “Don’t get me wrong; that was amazing, the song was amazing, he’s amazing.”

  Alien Drake, bemused, interrupted, “Just so we’re clear — everything’s amazing.”

  I licked my lips, wanting to start preparing my friends, letting them know this wasn’t going to last, even though I couldn’t really tell them that. “Yeah, I like him. But I’m trying not to get too attached, okay? I mean, where can this possibly go? He’s a movie star. We’ll all be seniors at Little High next year, but Adam will probably be filming a movie in France or something. What’s he going to do — fly home to meet me for study hall? Come to prom? I can’t get attached.” As the words spilled out, I realized I wasn’t preparing my friends — I was preparing myself. Even wrapped in lies, I couldn’t have shared any truer words.

  But, of course, it was too late.

  Chloe’s eyes found Adam up by the band. He was checking out the lead singer’s guitar, noticed us watching him, and gave a small wave. Chloe let out a sigh and shot me a worried look. “If you say so.”

  A few minutes later, Adam settled back down next to us on the blanket. The night had darkened enough for the fireworks to start launching. “Thanks for the song,” I whispered, my throat tight.

  Before he could respond, light burst open in the night sky above us.

  I jumped a little, mostly from the noise, and Adam put his arm around me. “Okay there, Jumpy?”

  I nodded, but inside I was miserable.

  When he leaned in to kiss me, I tried to ignore the sound of cameras. Instead, I imagined them as part of the cannon-thump of the fireworks launching, as part of the necessary space between that thump and the blooming of scattered light above us. Mostly, though, I needed to pretend all the noise — all the clicking of cameras around me and the popping of fireworks in the sky above me — was simply outside of me. When, really, I knew the noise was no match for the pounding in my chest, for the way he made me feel when he was near me.