Of Scars and Stardust

by Andrea Hannah

  “It’s not a surprise if I tell you.” Ella grinned and crammed a purple hat on her head. “Let’s go, or we’re going to be late.”

  Our bike tires whirred as we cut through the dirt road and the cold air. The cornfields on either side of us blurred into a smear of brown and dripped over into the cement sky. The wind made my face sting and my eyes water, and a few tentative snowflakes shuddered free from the clouds. I dug my boots into the pedals.

  I glanced back. Our house was a little red speck in the middle of broken stalks. The cornfield snapped and rustled in front of me. Ella jerked her bike in between the stalks and pedaled furiously through the snow.

  “Ell—wait.” I shoved my bike forward. But the tires just sank.

  “Crap,” she yelled. Her tires kicked up patches of snow as she inched through the stalks. “Forget this.” She hopped off her bike and let it fall to the ground. I swung off my own bike and followed her.

  “This way,” she huffed. “Right over there.”

  We trudged through the field. I shivered under my coat as I stepped over the broken stalks that Rae and I had sat between just two days before. The spot smelled muddy and earthy and like spring. No, the whole field smelled like spring. Like the promise of something about to bloom.

  “Ell, does it smell like spring to you?”

  She stopped and wrinkled her nose. “Nope. It smells like rotting dead things.”

  I touched the dried leaves and they snapped off in my glove. Maybe I just really wanted it to smell hopeful like spring, instead of dead like winter.

  “There, look.” Ella pointed to a flickering light in the middle of the field. She bounced and clapped her mittens together. “Come on!”

  She pulled me toward her, her fingers around my wrist, my shoulders brushing against the leaves. A head of dark, messy hair poked out from the stalks. A single candle lit up his face.

  “Happy birthday!” Grant cried. A cupcake wrapped in silver foil and smothered in chocolate frosting sat in his hand. The flicker from the candle lit up the corners of his grin like a jack-o’-lantern. “For you.”

  “Thanks,” I said. My cheeks felt hot and sweaty. I glanced at Ella, who was positively beaming. “Why’d you do this?”

  “You’re so dense sometimes, Claire,” Grant said, laughing. “Did you forget it’s your birthday?” He pulled my glove off by the fingertips and set the cupcake in my palm. “Now make a wish before the wind makes it for you.”

  I bit my lip. I could wish for anything in the whole world, but all I could think about was the way Grant was grinning and how the freckles on his nose looked just like the Big Dipper, with its handle pointing to his eyebrows. Rae had those same freckles, only hers were sprawled across her nose like a smattering of stars, all disjointed and chaotic. Just like Rae. I swallowed back her secret and the promise I’d made to keep it.

  “But what about Rae?” I blurted. I closed my eyes. Every curse word erupted inside of me, at her, for interrupting this moment. But it was too late; Rae had already infiltrated my head. She might as well be standing between Grant and me, pinching the flame on my birthday candle until it died a silent death.

  I sighed. “Shouldn’t you be back at your house with your mom, freaking out about Rae and all?”

  “Please. My sister’s not going anywhere,” Grant said. “Think about it. If she was really planning on skipping town, would she have left her suitcase sprawled open, poking out from under her bed? Now Mom’s going crazy and wants to keep her on lockdown.” Grant’s eyes flicked to toward the rapidly graying sky. “So seriously, make a wish.”

  “Come on, Claire, wish for new clothes!” Ella said, giggling. “Then I’ll grow into them.”

  “Okay, I wish for—”

  “Shhh,” Grant said, pressing a finger to my lips. His skin tasted like frosting and butter. “You can’t say it aloud or it won’t come true.”

  I closed my eyes. I thought about Rae and her secrets knotted up inside me. And then I thought of Ella’s broad grin and dimpled chin and the promises I whispered to her before bedtime each night: to love her, to make her happy, to always keep her safe.

  I wish I was the best at keeping my promises, I thought. Especially this one.

  I blew out the candle before the wind could steal my wish. Ella clapped and Grant laughed. He pulled a box from his pocket. “One more thing.”

  My heart jumped into my throat. Behind me, a small cry came from Ella; Grant’s birthday prize had managed to surprise even her. As I reached for the box, he grabbed my hand and turned it. He ran his thumb over the jagged cut in the middle of my palm. “Where’d that come from?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. Just a scratch.” I slid my hand from his.

  He nodded. “Here, I’ll hold the cupcake and you take the box.”

  “No, I’ll hold the cupcake.” Ella smiled, wiggling her fingers.

  “You will definitely not be holding the cupcake,” Grant said, but a crooked grin spread across his face.

  I popped off the lid of the box. A flat leather journal sat at the bottom: a wolf’s gray muzzle and sparkling yellow eyes that watched me from between tufts of tissue paper. I sucked in a breath.

  “Rae’s always talking about how you guys see the wolves out here,” Grant said slowly, glancing between my pink cheeks and the box in my hand, “and this one looked cool, with the eyes and everything.” When I didn’t say anything, he added, “We got it in town, at that new card shop Candice Dunnard opened, you know, on Main? Rae said you’d know what it meant.”

  Suddenly Ella’s warm cheek was next to me, and her hands were pulling the box from mine. She shook out the tissue paper until the wolf journal plopped onto her orange mitten. She blinked down at it before making a decision: “I don’t like it.” She lifted her eyes and watched the cornfield surrounding us, as if a wolf would appear between the stalks any second.

  Grant blinked. “Do you like it?”

  Something cold slid across my tongue like an ice cube, and my throat swelled shut. The jewels in place of eyes stared at me like watery yellow moons. I said, “I love it. Thanks.”

  “Claire, let’s go.” Ella tugged at my sleeve, glancing at the purple bellies of the clouds above us. She gnawed at her chapped lips and wiped her nose with her mitten. “It’s gonna snow.”

  I was turning to tell Grant goodbye, Ella practically pulling my arm out of my socket, when I caught his eyes watching me: green and rimmed with yellow, just like the tips of the cornstalks in the summer. Then Grant leaned forward and pressed a crumpled-up piece of paper into my palm. His breath brushed the tip of my ear as he whispered, “Did your wish come true yet?”

  I shook my head, just enough that his lips bumped into the skin behind my ears in an almost-kiss. I could feel his mouth curve into a smile against my neck. “It will if you come back later tonight.”

  My heart pounded and sweat webbed between my gloved fingers, and I thought that if there really were wolves, like Rae said, and if they knew all of my secrets, then they knew that my answer was already “Yes” before I whispered it into the cornfield.

  three

  I clutched Grant’s note in my fist as I lay awake. I pressed my face against the wall and listened: a tangle of sing-song words floated through the drywall. Ella was sleep-talking. Which meant she was finally asleep.

  Mom said that when she was pregnant with Ella, her belly as big as a watermelon, she went to the Ohio State Fair in Cleveland with my Aunt Sharon. She went to that one because she’d heard that a woman shows up there every year and claims to be the best psychic in the Midwest and that if she gets your fortune all wrong, you get your money back, no questions asked. So Mom asked her about the baby growing inside her. The psychic lady grabbed her hands and told her that Ella’s soul was a gift, that she was an angel sent to make us all better, and that we should listen to her words because she wouldn’t ha
ve very many. Well, Mom might have forgotten all about that prediction, but that lady for sure owed my mom ten bucks. Ella had so many words that she needed to use them up in her sleep.

  I threw the covers off my legs and slipped into my boots. I stuffed my flashlight, my house key minus the keychain, and a pack of gum into my pockets and headed for the door. But before I turned the knob, I checked one more time, just in case the words had somehow disintegrated. Rae’s invitation, scrawled over a sheet of lined paper, still felt solid in my hands:

  You’re invited

  To Claire Graham’s (kind of surprise) birthday party!

  Field between Lark Lake and Route 24.

  BYOB

  And, in smaller print below Rae’s invitation:

  Come tonight (please). And leave Ella at home this time.—G

  I silently pleaded that if there was a God, he would let me go to my own birthday party. And then I swore under my breath as the tired floorboards groaned beneath me. They let out sharp bursts of protest as I shuffled toward the back door, but as I got closer and closer to freedom, they must have figured I was a lost cause and fell silent.

  The wind bit at my neck as I stepped out the door, and for a second I thought I heard a whisper coming from the cornfield: Claire.

  I pressed my lips together and listened.

  Claire.

  The swish of slippers against hardwood behind me. And then the whisper again, louder this time: Claire! Where are you going?

  I turned and there she was, dressed in polka-dotted pajamas, a ring of messy blond curls framing her face.

  “Ell! What are you doing up? Go back to bed!”

  “What am I doing up? What are you doing up? And where do you think you’re going without me?” Ella tapped her slipper against the floor with a soft thud.

  The wind swept down my jacket, pinching at my collarbone beneath my sweater. For a second, I thought about just quietly stepping out the door, leaving Ella in the kitchen with her fuzzy slippers and crust in her eyes. But I couldn’t, because as desperately as I wanted to be alone with Grant, Ella was like a stubborn puppy attached to my hip. I sighed. “You can’t go, Ell. Not this time.”

  She stepped toward me, hands on her hips. “Why?”

  “Because.”

  “Why?”

  I gritted my teeth and let the wind click the door shut behind me. Grant’s face hovering over mine, the freckles on his nose pressing against my skin, flashed through my mind. “It’s a party for kids in high school, Ell. You can’t come this time. I’m sorry.”

  Something in Ella’s eyes flashed, and her fists went limp at her sides. Relief caught in my throat. But as I reached for the doorknob again, she kicked off her slippers so that they slid across the floor and thumped against the oven.

  “What are you doing?” I asked. When she didn’t answer me, and instead started shuffling toward the living room, I hooked her by the elbow. “What are you doing?”

  She tugged her arm free and lifted her chin. “I’m almost thirteen, Claire. I’m getting my jacket.” And then she stomped toward the living room, her bare feet slapping against the floor.

  I chewed on my lip as I watched her go, deflated. Once Ella decided she was going to do something, even a tornado couldn’t stop her. Literally. Three years ago, I was holed up in the basement with Mom and Dad while the sirens wailed across Amble. Ella had told us she was coming downstairs in a minute; just a second, she needed to check on something, she said. When she didn’t come, Dad went to look for her and found her plucking washed-out dandelions in the rain because she “didn’t want them to get blown away.”

  Ella had decided that she was going where I was going as soon as she’d heard my bed creak. And there was nothing I could do about it.

  Just then, she burst back into the kitchen, a scarf wrapped halfway around her neck, one boot on her foot and the other in her hand. Her eyes were round and wild and filled up with moonlight as she stared through the window. “Did you hear that?” she whispered.

  And then I heard it: a low, melancholic howl ripping through the night.

  Ella’s bottom lip quivered as she said, “I’m not afraid of them.”

  I turned and wrapped my arm around her shoulder. “They sound pretty close.” I glanced out the window and pulled my lip into my mouth, my stomach sinking.

  Ella’s shoulders shook beneath my arm. “How close?” she whispered.

  I closed my eyes. How bad of a sister was I if I used Ella’s insurmountable fear of Rae’s wolf stories to escape into the night? But I couldn’t shake Grant’s face. I’d almost memorized the way his letters looped around the paper.

  Come tonight (please). And leave Ella at home this time.—G

  “Really close, Ell. By Lark Lake probably,” I said, smoothing her hair away from her face.

  A guttural sound emerged from the field, and quickly turned into a sharp snarl. A series of biting howls trailed after it.

  Ella pressed her head into my shoulder. “You said that Rae was just telling stories. You said they weren’t even real, that they were just dogs in Wellington County.” Her voice cracked on the word dogs. “I know they’re just dogs, Claire.”

  I glanced out the smudged kitchen windows and watched the stalks bend with the wind. Amble’s deep farming roots were flecked with whispers of wolves that snapped and snarled, that stained the dirt roads with bloody paw prints, that watched us all with gem-colored eyes. That they were responsible for eight-year-old Sarah Dunnard’s disappearance just last month, even though it had never been proven, exactly. Dad and the rest of the police had found pinpricks of her blood, soaked into roots of the cornstalks around her house, but they hadn’t found her body.

  No one really wanted believe those stories, to admit that the wolves could be real. Still, Amble’s exasperated parents used them as a warning if you didn’t eat all your peas at dinner—the wolves might be watching, so you better do it. Rae was the only one who actually believed in the wolves, who preached the dangers of cherry pie baking at the church festival and the risk of walking alone past Lark Lake. Until Ella started listening to her.

  “They’re just dogs, Claire,” Ella repeated, her voice cracking over the letters in my name.

  I felt my neck grow pink as frustration spread to my cheeks. The clock on the microwave flashed 11:15 p.m. I was fifteen minutes late to my fifteenth birthday party.

  I shrugged Ella away and grabbed her shoulders. “Rae was right. They’re wolves. I saw one today, in the cornfield earlier.” I thought back to the flash of fur I’d seen hidden in the stalks, so similar to a misshapen shadow that it could have been just that.

  Ella’s eyes grew wide and her lip began to quiver again. “You can’t go.”

  11:16 on the clock. The minutes between Grant and me were slowly ticking away. I pulled myself from Ella and shuffled through the knife drawer. Grabbing a small paring knife, I stuck it in my back pocket. Then I pushed the door open before I could change my mind.

  “Look, Ell. I’ve got a knife, I’ll be fine. If I’m not back in a couple hours, you can worry about me. But I’ll be fine, Ell. Go back to bed.”

  And then it was just me and the wind that made the corn crinkle and fold around me and I was running, running, running.

  By the time I made it to the clearing in the middle of the cornfield, I’d forgotten all about the wolves. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that Ella was somehow still watching me.

  “You finally made it!” Rae cried, stumbling through a stalk that refused to stay frozen to the ground. “Whoops.” She giggled as she tripped on something that was invisible to me. “I’m a teensy bit drunk.”

  She wrapped me in a sloppy hug, her breath warm and cherry on my neck. I gently pushed her away and looked at her face. Her green eyes, an exact replica of Grant’s, were half-lidded and empty. “Rae, how much have you had to drink already
?”

  “Just a lil’ bit.” She grinned, holding up a half-drunk bottle of cherry vodka. Then she shoved it into my hands, its contents splashing into the icy film beneath us. “Rest is yours, Claire-bear.” Before I could say thanks, Rae had my hand in hers and was dragging me toward the bonfire gurgling in the center of the clearing.

  There were people here—a lot of people. Way more than I knew, even though this was supposed to be my party. But by the looks of the lanky guys with beards who were collecting around a tub of liquor bottles and a table littered with shot glasses, and the clique of senior girls who bought their pot from Rae, this seemed more like Rae’s going away party than my birthday party.

  “I want you to meet Robbie,” Rae slurred, pulling me toward the group of guys. But something inside my stomach pinched as she pulled me forward and I dug my heels into the wet ground. Rae turned, her eyes wide with surprise, her lips parted in disbelief. “What’re you doin’, Claire?”

  I frowned. What was I doing? I’d always trusted Rae, I’d always followed. Why couldn’t I now? I glanced around the party. Groups of girls I barely knew sat huddled around the fire, lips purple and noses red. A couple of kids from my grade orbited around the tubs of beer at the other side of the clearing, but never got close enough to actually take one. And Grant. Grant was nowhere.

  I pulled my hand from the crook of her elbow. “Is this really my birthday party, Rae? None of my friends are even here.”

  “Of course it’s your birthday party, Claire! You know all these people ’cept Robbie’s friends.”

  I glanced around again, in case I’d missed something. “No, I don’t.”

  Rae flicked her hand and said, “Sure you do! You know Stacey over there, ’member? We all hung out last summer!”

  I glanced at Stacey huddled between two other girls I didn’t know by the fire. She did look vaguely familiar. And then I remembered: Stacey had been the first of Rae’s friends to get her license, so Rae had invited her over one time to take us to the mall.