Catch a Falling Star

by Culbertson, Kim

  Turning, she smiled sweetly. “I know … but this time it might be in People.”

  I caught Alien Drake’s eye. “Slow learning curve, that one.”

  He pulled Chloe onto his lap.

  An hour later, I was sitting cross-legged on my bed with Extra Pickles when someone tapped on my door. “Come in.”

  Dad poked his head in the room. He held a small white box in his hand tied with a gold bow. “Hey, this came for you. Today was the big fight, right?”

  “Yeah.” I patted Extra Pickles’s head. The box was from Morning Glory, my favorite bakery. Dad brought it to me on the bed, and I opened it. Nestled inside was a single, perfect vanilla cupcake with pink icing and star sprinkles. There was no note.

  “From Adam?” Dad settled on the cedar chest where I kept things like yearbooks, old dance programs, a shoe box of elementary school pictures.

  I shrugged. “Probably Parker.”

  Dad scanned my walls. “I haven’t sat in here in a while. You still loving this green?”

  When I was ten, I’d begged my parents to paint my room Kermit green with white trim. I had been obsessed with the Muppets, the old ones from the seventies, and I wanted my room to match Kermit, my favorite character.

  “I’m still digging the Kermit.”

  Dad smiled. “He’s a classic.”

  We both noticed the awkward pause. Dad wasn’t much for small talk, and he was being sort of fidgety, clearly trying to work up the nerve to say something to me. “What’s up, Dad?”

  He gave me a steady look, his eyes searching my face. “Why aren’t you dancing anymore?”

  “Did Mom put you up to this?” I set the cupcake box on my side table.

  “No!” He flushed. “Okay, yes. We’ve been having a lot of talks about you lately.”

  I pulled my ivory pillow onto my lap like a shield. “So it seems. What does Mom think?”

  “That you freaked out.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “I didn’t freak out.”

  “Sure you did. It’s okay, Carter. People freak out. It’s not always a bad thing. Sometimes it’s a response that reminds you that you’re alive with choices. You were handed this huge thing, this massive piece of praise, and you freaked out. It’s okay.”

  “It never happened to you. You went from high school to Little Eats. Point A to Point B. Simple.”

  He licked his lips. “Is that what you think I did?”

  “Didn’t you?”

  “Actually, I tried pretty hard to do the musician thing for a few years before I came back to Little.” He explained he’d been with a band that had bopped around Northern California, getting gigs here and there, hoping to be picked up by a label. “But it didn’t happen, and we landed in Santa Cruz, where I met your mom.”

  My stomach hurt. “Why haven’t you ever told me?”

  “You never asked.”

  “I’m not asking now and you’re telling me.”

  He sighed, his face freckled with the light coming in through the blinds. “You might be an old soul, Carter, but you’re still seventeen.”

  My stomach churned, and the air-conditioning in our house felt wrong, too cold, too dry. “You think I should have taken that scholarship.” Extra Pickles stared up at me with big eyes, whining at the increased pitch of my voice.

  “I don’t, actually.” Dad fiddled with a stack of my laundry I hadn’t yet put away. “Personally, I don’t think you would like New York, which is why I didn’t say anything at the time. I don’t think you need to want New York or all it stands for. But I think you made a mistake just stopping.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You don’t have to go to New York or college or wherever to be a dancer. I played in a lot of cool venues. It was great, until it wasn’t, and then I came home, and I have the café now and I love it. That was my journey. That was my choice. But you just stopped. All those years of love just ceased to be. And I think that was a mistake.” He folded and unfolded a sweatshirt that kept falling off the stack. “Mom and I both think that.”

  I leaned into the wall behind my bed, the light changing the room, shifting to evening. “But you didn’t say anything before.”

  “We weren’t sure you were ready to hear it.”

  I thought back to the day I told the school no, the sound of dead air on the other end of the phone. “Other people wanted me to go.”

  He laughed, a funny short breath of air. “This isn’t about other people. This is about you.” Leaning forward, his wide shoulders shifting, he said, “Carter, I love how much you help other people. You’re so much like your mom. But what you don’t get is that you have to work out your own self first. You have to decide what you want from your own life. Then you have to be accountable to it. And just so you know, people criticized me for throwing in the towel too early. My former bandmates never spoke to me again, and I spent some years feeling like a failure.”

  “You did? You?”

  “Listen to me, Carter, because you know me and I don’t like to give speeches. That’s been hard with John, and I’ve never really had to with you, but I’m going to try one, okay?”

  “Okay.” Touched by how hard this was for him, I sat up a little.

  He cleared his throat. “Here’s the thing you need to know. Here’s a hint from Grown-up World. There’s no right way. Not really. Just perspective. We choose whether we succeed or fail. We do. It’s all our own spin on it. We create our own definition of success or failure. You can’t hold yourself up to other people’s versions of things. Not society’s idea of things, and not other people’s. Your own. But regret … well, that’s a real thing. Take it from me. You should try things on, see if they fit you. If they don’t, it’s not failure. It’s a choice. But always let yourself have a choice, let yourself have possibilities. People say, ‘Follow your dreams, blah blah blah,’ but no one’s checking up on that, no one’s out there with a clipboard saying, ‘Yes, Carter Moon. Dream followed!’ You’re accountable to yourself. So if you don’t ever take the chances, if you don’t ever at least try, you’re going to be sitting in that café when you’re forty wondering about them.”

  “You don’t know that for sure.” My voice wavered.

  “Sure I do. Why do you think I started Glory Daze? There’s no irony lost in that name. Besides, you’re already wondering or you wouldn’t still be teaching that Snow Ridge class, you wouldn’t be finding a way to keep it in your life.”

  “I like that class because it’s just fun. It’s not about me.” Even as I said it, though, I knew that it was about me. I could tell myself it was about the old people there, and somehow it seemed less selfish of a pursuit if it was about helping them, but I kept doing it because they asked me to “do a dance” each week without wanting anything from it, without suggesting that it be some sort of future goal. “I just don’t want to be selfish. Mom’s always saying how I was already born on third base, so I shouldn’t act like I’ve hit a triple.”

  Dad laughed then, familiar with one of Mom’s favorite expressions. “You have never been an entitled kid, Carter. Even when you were nine, you donated all your birthday money to a wildlife foundation.” He leaned back against the wall, studying me, his eyes glossy. “We think it’s great, but Mom and I never meant to teach you to give up yourself entirely. That’s not what we meant at all. It’s not selfish to love something, to put something beautiful out in the world. If you can keep it about that, and not turn it into a bunch of narcissistic mega-crap, well, that’s its own sort of service. You’ve got to figure out what makes the world beautiful for you, so you can help make it beautiful for other people.”

  Around me, my room breathed with its familiar sounds, Extra Pickles’s breathing, the slow spin of the ceiling fan. “I just like it here.”

  Dad stood. “Honey, you’re one of those lucky people who will like a lot of places. And you will always have here.” He bent to kiss my head, and Extra Pickles followed him out of the room, leaving me alone.r />
  Morning, sky watchers. Last night, we sat on the roof and thought about constellations. Constellations are these patterns that human beings stitched into the sky starting, like, 4,000 years ago (probably longer) to make sense of it, to be able to point at a group of stars and say, That’s Orion, or That’s the Big Dipper. But they are just groupings of stars. They exist only because humans invented them, made them up to create order out of the crazy, wide sky, a sky that would exist without humans ever naming it. It’s a human need — that order — because it gives us a sense that we have control. But we don’t. Not really. At any point, you could make up your own patterns — point out three or four stars and call them the Donut. As long as you know what star you’re looking at, the patterns already there don’t necessarily matter at all.

  It got us thinking about all the patterns in our own lives that we assume we must follow — graduation, college, work, marriage. Who stitched those patterns together and decided they were the only way to look at life?

  We were just wondering.

  See you tonight, under the sky.

  i worked the next couple of days at the café. Adam’s shooting schedule was insane, and Parker thought it would make our fight more believable if we didn’t have much contact. I tried to lose myself in the busy buzz of the café, tried to let the rhythm of the summer crowd clear him from my mind, but every time the door pushed open, I found myself wishing he would be coming through it.

  After work, I walked home. Evening fell in Little in that summer sort of way, where the sky melts into sherbet colors at the horizon over the pines, and the air starts to carry small pricks of cool mountain nights within its heat. This was my favorite time of day in the summer, that easy melting. It loosened the knots of my busy mind.

  No one was home, so I poured a glass of iced tea, grabbed the box of frozen Junior Mints I’d been saving, and crawled into the childhood space of my tree house to watch the sun set through the wide window.

  My parents wanted a list of my options — something that would help grow me outside of Little. But I only seemed to want to watch Little melt into nighttime. I wasn’t sure I wanted more than this — the sweet glow of twilight, nothing beyond the way the ease of it seeped under my skin, the way the frozen Junior Mints tasted in my mouth.

  Somehow, that made me wrong. I should want more than Junior Mints on a summer evening.

  I read once somewhere that dancers must have passion, talent, and ambition to succeed in the professional world. A trifecta of skills. For years, I’d confused ambition with hard work, with that energetic pulse that pushed me to class each day, that made me ice my aching muscles and get back up again to dance. Hard work. Dancing was hard work. But hard work was not ambition.

  Ambition was something else.

  And I didn’t have it.

  Adam had it. It drove him to endure the crowds, the tabloids, the constant stream of attention, both bad and good. It buoyed him. Beckett Ray had it — it sent her head spinning with big-city dreams.

  But not Country Mouse me.

  Why didn’t I seem to want more than this town?

  I popped another mint into my mouth, staring out at the gloaming, thinking about the day I turned down that scholarship last summer. Would I ever regret not choosing New York? I didn’t think I would, but Dad wasn’t talking about New York. He was talking about dancing, the simple act of it. Not what I could parlay it into, but just doing it. Because it made the world more beautiful to me to be dancing in it. He’d said I would regret leaving it behind, that I was already building my regret.

  Why had I felt there were only two options?

  Hardcore professional-track dancing, the path all my teachers had wanted for me, expected of me.

  Nothing.

  When I thought about it, it seemed so immature. Like a child who, because she couldn’t stomach a massive sixteen-scoop sundae, suddenly refused all ice cream. I’d turned down New York, but I didn’t have to turn it all down. Why hadn’t I considered the wide expanse of middle ground, of other possibilities?

  There was a knock on the door frame, and Adam poked his head into the tree house. “Let’s make up,” he said with a smile.

  Seeing him was like sinking into a hot bath.

  I motioned him in. “I forgive you.”

  “Um, you mean I forgive you.”

  “If you say so.” I thought of our fight. Yesterday, Chloe had sent me a text: I’m that shoulder! — with links to several of the online celebrity sites documenting our fight, a picture of me actually crying on their shoulders afterward, and a few other articles about the fight. They had headlines like, “Big Trouble in Little Paradise?”

  I’d deleted the text.

  Adam settled against the wall next to me, staring out the slat of window. “Wow, look at that sunset.” I noticed the faint traces of makeup at his temples. He must have just come from shooting.

  I offered him a Junior Mint. “Beautiful, huh? I love this time of day.”

  He popped it into his mouth. “You love whatever time of day it is.” He brushed some hair away from the side of my face, his touch, as always, leaving an electric glaze on my skin. He dropped his hand back into his lap. “I don’t know how you do it.”

  “Do what?”

  “Just always love being right where you are.” He breathed in deeply. “It’s like you were born without any restlessness at all. You don’t seem to need anything other than what you have.”

  I shot him a wary look. “I’m warning you, if you make any Hobbit references at all, I will punch you in the face.” But I thought about what Dad had said earlier, about being the sort of person who just loved things. Somehow, I felt like I should apologize for it, for being fine right here.

  He held up his hands in mock defense. “No, seriously, I would give anything for that. To be able to — how did you describe it when I first met you? Not venture outside the fence. It’s very grounded and sweet.”

  I gave a sort of snort. “Yeah, lots of good it’s doing me. People don’t trust it.”

  Adam thought about it. “I think people tend to confuse your sweetness with being naïve or sheltered, and I don’t think that’s you. You know there are bad things in the world. You’re even trying to make them better. Just like your parents.”

  “My parents are kicking me out.” He looked at me quizzically, and I told him about my list, about the talk with my parents about life after Little.

  Adam helped himself to a few more Junior Mints. “I think they worry you’ll have regrets.” At my dark look, he hurriedly added, “I know, I know … you probably don’t believe in regret.”

  Sighing, I said, “I think my theory might be faulty. Apparently, you can’t have regrets until you’re too old to do anything about them.” I shook the last of the mints from the box. “I’m sure they’re worried that the regret won’t be about what might have happened, but more about never trying in the first place.” A breeze came in through the window, cooling my face, and sending the wind chimes in our neighbor’s yard singing.

  Adam contemplated the evening light sneaking into the tree house. Outside, the sherbet colors had faded, leaving the sky bruised and pale. “You know, you can love a place and still leave it. It’s always here. It’s not going anywhere.”

  “I know. It’s just that I like it here already. I have roots here.”

  Outside, the crickets started an early chirping. Adam said, “I’m not sure I like the whole roots thing.”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s so limiting. It’s like, well, you have roots here, so you have to rip them up if you want to go anywhere else. It’s so … botanical. Like we’re a bunch of semi-transplantable shrubs or something.” He gave a little shudder.

  I studied the shadows moving along the walls of the tree house. “Having roots is a real thing. You don’t get it because you’re, well, because you’re famous. Your world is too big.”

  He winced. “Judge much? I can’t have roots because I’m from Hollywood?
Small towns have the market cornered on roots? It’s not true, you know. I know I can always be in L.A., but it doesn’t mean I can’t go other places, be other places.”

  “But that’s your job.”

  “I guess. But I like to think of L.A. as my home port. I can sail around wherever, but it’s always a place to put down my anchor. Yeah, I like the anchor metaphor better than the root one. More room to move with the anchor metaphor.”

  My mind reeled with anchor and shrub imagery. I saw his point, but I was sticking with my roots. “I think small towns get such a bad reputation. No one ever criticizes kids who want to stay living in L.A. or New York. They’re allowed to stay in their hometowns without people thinking they’re closing off their options.”

  Adam shrugged. “Maybe, but I think the point is to try new things.”

  “I try new things! Yesterday, I ate a white beet.”

  “Yes, that’s an adventure, all right.”

  “Have you tried a white beet?”

  “I doubt it.”

  The room had darkened around us, cocooning us in the upcoming night. I wanted to tell him that I thought there were anchor people and there were root people and those were different sorts of people. I wanted to say that not everyone had to have adventure for their lives to feel full, but I heard the back door slam shut. Hurried footsteps crossed our deck, then Dad stuck his head through the tree house door, his face twisted with worry.

  “What is it?” My body tensed.

  Dad nodded quickly to Adam. “It’s your brother. He’s in the hospital. We have to go.”

  Adam’s gaze slipped between us. “Mik’s out front. He can drive us.”

  This was not the Christmas hospital of Adam’s movie shoot. No festive decorations, no nurses wearing holiday-themed scrubs. It was empty and white. The woman working the front desk gave us a wan smile before handing Dad a clipboard, dark circles beneath her eyes, no Kelly to dab on some concealer at last look. After Dad filled out the necessary information, he’d gone off in search of the doctor while Mom and I sat in the waiting room on a couple of cracked blue chairs. Adam stood near the vending machines, avoiding the stacks of magazines strewn about. Two had his picture somewhere on the cover. The only other person in the waiting room was an old man in a flannel shirt and running shorts reading a hunting magazine. He sat with his fish-belly-white legs splayed out like opened scissors. He hadn’t recognized Adam or, if he had, he didn’t care. Above us, two of the fluorescent lights buzzed, shuddering off, then on, every few minutes.