Of Scars and Stardust

by Andrea Hannah

  I stared at his hand on my jeans. “I fell asleep.”

  He smiled. “Yeah, for a little.”

  I pulled the map from his lap and squinted into the dark. “How much farther?”

  Grant shrugged, but it was getting so dark now that I could just barely make out the lines of his shoulders. “Just a little farther.” The truck slid on a patch of ice as it rounded a corner onto an almost invisible road. He straightened the wheel and let out a breath. “It’s getting icy.”

  I tried to look out into the night, but I couldn’t see past the headlights. Fat clumps of snow splattered against the windshield with such force that the road beyond them was almost completely blocked out. The tires still churned beneath us, slow and unstable. At one point, the entire back end of the truck started to slide off the road. I grabbed for the dashboard.

  “It’s right up here,” Grant breathed. “Right up here.”

  I don’t know why I did it; I didn’t even think about it. I wrapped my fingers around his. And then I squeezed, just like he always did to my wrist when I was nervous or afraid or anything else hurt. My heart didn’t jump in my chest; my palms didn’t start to sweat. I just looked out the windshield and imagined how much more dangerous it was out there than it was in here with him.

  “You know why I have to find them, right?” I said into the dark.

  He didn’t say anything for a long time. The tires whirred and slid beneath us, and I thought he might be concentrating on that instead. But then he squeezed my hand and said, “I know.”

  I looked at him; his eyes were lit up like cat’s eyes under the moon. “I’m not crazy.”

  He squeezed my hand again. “I know.”

  The truck’s headlights bounced as Grant hit a pothole and I got a flash of tall house with gray siding at the end of the road. I leaned forward and put my free hand on the dashboard. “Is that your aunt’s house?”

  And then the tires got quiet, and even the ice stopped splintering into delicate spiderwebs beneath us. Grant flicked the headlights off, still staring through the windshield.

  “That’s Rae’s car,” he said, pointing. “That red one in the driveway.”

  I squinted through the dark and saw the bumper of some kind of regular old red car. Even though it wasn’t anything spectacular, I couldn’t help but feel a pang of jealousy. How had Rae, and even Grant, grown up so much, while I was still stuck inside myself, old and dusty and rotting with regret?

  “Can’t we pull into the driveway?” I asked, tucking my hand back into my lap to keep it warm.

  Grant stared ahead, the expression on his face a mixture of guilt and sadness and something like misery. I knew that look, because that’s what I always saw in my own face whenever I’d sent those fake-teeth pictures to Mom and Dad.

  He turned toward me, then, and grabbed my hand from my lap. “I’m nervous,” he said finally. “I don’t know what to do.”

  “It’s okay,” I said, squeezing his hands. “She’s your sister. We’re going to go in there, ask her some questions, and leave. Okay?”

  He leaned forward and looked at me, really looked at me, like no one had since the day I’d found Ella. And for that second, the world stopped spinning, and the stars quit orbiting around each other in their silly little dance, and everything was still. I was still, and I knew he could see it. Because the moment we’d started this road trip together, I knew that whatever had been churning in him about seeing Rae had gone still, too.

  And maybe that was just what we were now: two people with broken sisters who needed to stitch each other back together with hand squeezes and stillness. And maybe that was okay. Maybe that was more than okay.

  He cupped my fingers in his and breathed. “Okay.”

  twenty-one

  Grant’s truck practically slid into the driveway behind Rae’s red sedan. He shuffled up the icy steps, taking his sweet time like he always did, but I knew it wasn’t because he was worried about slipping. I placed my hand between his shoulder blades and stood on my tiptoes to whisper in his ear: “We’ll leave in less than an hour, promise.”

  Grant nodded once, took a breath, and pressed the doorbell.

  A dog howled from behind the door and the blinds shook in the window. I grabbed Grant’s arm and reminded myself that it was just a dog, just a dog, just a dog.

  Someone’s muffled voice swore from behind the door, just before it swung open. Rae stood in the entryway, two fingers hooked over her jeans.

  Her eyes fluttered for a second as she looked at Grant. But I wasn’t watching her; I kept my eyes on him, on the tight line of his lips and the way the skin on his neck was blotchy. Rae stole a glance at me, and then looked back at Grant. “Hey,” she said, like he’d just come home from the grocery store. And then she turned to walk back into the house. “Come on in, if you want.”

  I watched the back of her neck as we followed her into the house. A small tattoo of some kind of lizard curled around the tip of her spine, poking out from under her shirt. Her hair was still short and spiky, and her skin still looked like caramel with a drop of milk splashed in, but everything else was different.

  We stepped into a kitchen that had the same-colored walls as split-pea soup. The dog, which turned out to be a lumpy little pug, snorted at my feet. Rae plopped onto a stool and grabbed an apple from the basket next to her. “So what’s up, little brother?”

  Grant let out a short breath as he sank into the stool across from her. I stood, mostly because I felt almost invisible in Rae’s presence.

  Grant’s head dipped between his shoulders as he cleared his throat. And he cleared his throat again. Rae rolled her eyes and took a bite of her apple. “Come on, Grant,” she said, the clumps of peel rolling over her tongue. “Spit it out.”

  But Grant didn’t spit it out. It was like he was frozen in one of those huge blocks of ice they try to preserve bodies in: eyes wide, staring off into space. Except that he kept making that grumbling sound in his throat.

  Rae scoffed and tossed her half-eaten apple back into the bowl. She jumped off the stool and said, “Okay, well, I have some things to do. So let me know when you want to talk.”

  I stepped in front of her. Rae’s eyes flickered, and she was forced to look at me for the first time since she’d stolen my birthday party and made it part of her own personal escape plan. “We came to talk to you about the wolves.”

  There. I’d said it. I’d said it like they were real entities; I’d said it to someone other than Grant for the first time since they’d shipped me off to New York.

  Rae took a step back, her eyes wide and her mouth hanging open. She looked like I’d just slapped her. The pug snorted at her feet and she scooped down to pick it up. She held it like a chubby, wriggling shield between us.

  “You mean you came all the way up here”—she turned to look at Grant—“to talk about the wolves? Are you out of your freaking mind?”

  Her eyes were filled with fire as she turned back around to me. “I always knew you took those stupid stories too far. I could see it on your face, even when you said you didn’t believe it.” She shook her head, and the pug wiggled with her. “Crazy. I always knew you were crazy.”

  It felt like my lungs collapsed in my chest when she said that word, that word that kept me staring at the ceiling every night. I gasped for air, clutching my stomach. If Ella were here—the one who used to say more words than she had breath for—she would step between us. She would tell Rae to shove off and that her sister wasn’t crazy and that it didn’t run in our family, or any of those other things people said about me. Then she’d say that she never liked Rae’s stupid spiky hair anyway, so there. But Ella wasn’t here. She hadn’t been in a long time, and I was out of breath for words.

  Rae dropped the pug to the floor and took a step forward. “I tried to be your friend, you know. Get you to lighten up, live a little. But all
you cared about was drawing your dress pictures and hovering over Ella like some creepy stalker. Even your parents begged my mom to let you come over to hang out because they thought you needed to talk to someone!” Her lip curled into a snarl and my stomach lurched. She looked almost like the wolf I’d always seen in my mind: piercing eyes, quivering lips, ready for blood.

  “And what did you freaking do?” Rae continued. “You tried to blame what you did to Ella on some wolf stories I’d told you years ago. You were always jealous of her.” Rae slumped against the counter now, but this time she looked different. Before, when she’d answered the door, she seemed like she’d been pumped full of three-dimensional color: vibrant and bright and almost trembling with confidence. But it was as if the words she’d held inside of her had been powering her, kept her lit up like a Christmas tree, and now that she’d finally said them to me, she was starting to fade and become human again.

  “They weren’t just stories, Rae. Ella left me a note.” I took a deep breath. “She told me they’re always watching, that they’re going to take her away. That’s why we’re here. This is where Ella told us to come.”

  Rae jerked her head up to look at me, and the expression on her face caught me off-guard. Her face wasn’t furious; her mouth wasn’t twisted in a sharp grin anymore.

  She looked scared.

  But in an instant, the fear drained from her face as she turned to scoop up the dog again. “I doubt it,” she said, only this time it was softer, less convinced. “There’s nothing up here to find.”

  Grant opened his mouth to say something, but Rae practically bolted from the kitchen, the pug tucked under her arm, before he had a chance to get words out. He turned to me instead. “Let’s get out of here. We’re not getting anywhere.”

  I glanced into the tiny dining room, where Rae was slumped over the table, absentmindedly twisting the stem of her half-eaten apple. “I think we need to stay a little longer,” I whispered. “I think she knows something.”

  Grant nodded slowly, almost like he was afraid to admit he’d picked up on Rae’s strange behavior too. He sighed. “Fine. But what excuse do we make up for having to stay the night?”

  I looked out the window at the snow smothering the streets, the lamp posts, the hood of the truck. “I don’t think we need to make anything up.” I took his hand in mine.

  “Snowstorm,” he whispered.

  Rae wasn’t happy when Grant insisted we’d have to stay until the snow cleared in the morning. At first she tried to convince us that it wasn’t even that icy out, and that the truck had four-wheel drive, so we should be fine. But when she went out onto the back porch to let the dog out and fell on her ass, she came back inside and grumbled, “Fine. You can stay in the craft room.”

  As it turns out, Rae and Grant’s Aunt Deb—their mother’s sister—owned several of the houses on this tiny block, and she rented them out for cheap. Rae had taken over this one last year when she started working at the Mobil down the street, and Aunt Deb shifted her things to the remodeled house next door. Her craft room, however, had stayed.

  I snuggled into Grant out of necessity—it was freezing at this end of the house, and the pull-out sofa was only a double—but I couldn’t say I minded. We both curled into lumpy, awkward sleeping bags that smelled like dust and beef jerky, and the space heater gave off a lukewarm blast of air from the corner. But somehow, as we peeked at each other through

  the sleeping bag zippers, it was enough to keep out the cold.

  “Hey, do you still have the wolf journal I got you that time, for your birthday?” Grant whispered, tucking his nose into his sweatshirt.

  I nodded. “Yeah, I have it.”

  “You ever write in it?”

  I paused for a second and shifted my legs so that my socks weren’t tangled on the bottom zipper. “No.” I rolled onto my back and stared at a spiderweb crack in the ceiling. “I guess diary writing isn’t my thing.”

  Grant wiggled in his sleeping bag so that he could prop his head up in his hand. “It could be your thing, if you wanted it to be.”

  I turned to look at him. “What do you mean?”

  “It’s just that you’re one of those people that can do anything if you want to,” he breathed. “You’re kinda like magic, Claire.” He quickly cleared his throat. “I just mean, you—you’re one of those people who always makes me feel better when you’re around.”

  My head felt fuzzy, and the walls wobbled around me. The only person who’d ever been magic in Amble was Ella. Maybe Grant had spent so much time thinking about the wolves and Ella with me that he’d started to confuse me with her. Because I wasn’t magic; I couldn’t make the stars bounce and everything look like it was drenched in pink sunlight and make people feel like they were flying just by listening to my laugh. Maybe I’d hugged Ella so hard that some of her light had rubbed off on me.

  I looked up at him. “You really think that?”

  “Yep,” he said. And then he pulled his hand free from the sleeping bag and put it on top of mine.

  “Then why didn’t you come to my birthday party?” I pushed the sleeping bag down around me and sat up. “Why did you tell me to come alone, not bring Ella, if you weren’t even going to show up?”

  Grant scrunched his eyebrows and started that throat-clearing thing, and I thought he was going to give me some stupid excuse about how he had a runny nose or he had to wrap Christmas presents for his mom. But then he swallowed and said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  That wasn’t what I’d been expecting. I said it again, slower this time: “You didn’t come to my party. Even after that note.” I felt a blush tingling on my cheeks when I said it, but I prayed it was too dark for Grant to tell.

  Grant leaned forward so that his face was almost next to mine, and I swore he must have been able to feel the heat coming off my cheeks. “What are you talking about? I meant what I said in that note. I wanted to be there. But Rae told me that you didn’t want me to come. She said you had a date coming or something.”

  “I was alone,” I breathed into the dark. “I was alone that night.” I suddenly had the urge to cry, and I started getting that prickly feeling in the corners of my eyes. I wished I’d known, I so wished I’d known. What would have changed if I’d known? Maybe I wouldn’t have touched that cherry vodka because I’d have been too busy laughing and talking and maybe touching Grant. And maybe the wolves wouldn’t have smelled it in the snow, and they wouldn’t have ripped half of Ella’s face off when they caught a whiff of her in the cornfield. It was too much; I couldn’t think about it. I pressed my fingers to my eyes. “Why would she do that?” I whispered.

  I waited, but he didn’t answer. When I finally pulled my fingers from my eyelids, he was staring up at the ceiling with that look of misery and sadness swirled all over his face again. “Because those are the kinds of things Rae does.” He sighed. “Those are the things she’s always done.”

  We lay there, staring quietly into the night that peeked through the dingy window, inches away from each other but so far apart. After a long minute, Grant said, “Which is why it’s so hard to believe you about the wolves, because Rae told those same stories too. Even though I really, really want to.”

  I felt something sharp poke a hole into my lungs. I really, really wanted him to believe me too, even though I knew he was still lingering on the border of staying put in black and white Amble, where even possibilities had to be made of concrete, rather than following me into the gray blur of wolves and shadows and almost-truths. I turned and looked at him. “You don’t believe me because of Rae?”

  He closed his eyes. “It’s hard to believe you because of Rae. She … she made up so many stories about so many things, you know? I feel like she just spat lies—to me, our mom, everyone—until the day she left Amble.” He turned and opened his eyes. They looked like glowing, green orbs under the moonlight.
“That doesn’t mean I don’t want you to prove me wrong, or else I wouldn’t be here with you. I want to believe you, like I believed her. Only I want you to actually be right.”

  I started to open my mouth to say something, but Grant just shook his head and said, “Sometimes you ignore the bad things about the people you love because you love them so much.” He shrugged. “I did.”

  I looked at him just then, and he looked different and the same all over again. He was still Grant, out in the cornfield with a half-wrapped package in his hands and a half-crooked grin on his face. And he was still this Grant, too, with his star-freckled nose and eyes that changed shades of green depending on the time of day. But right then, there was this moment: that moment when all of a sudden you look at someone like you could maybe love them one day, and at the same time you realize that you’ve been looking at them that way all along without even knowing it. And how you realize you could have something better than what you’ve let yourself have.

  That moment when you realize there is more.

  I pushed my sleeping bag all the way down to my ankles and scooted closer to Grant.

  “What are you—” he started, but this time I didn’t wait. I pressed my nose to his, and then I kissed him.

  I kissed him with enough force to power two years’ worth of regret for leaving, and ninety-six hours’ worth of understanding what I had missed. I didn’t think about the cold outside, or the heat between us, or that there were supposed to be wolf howls tearing through the night. I just listened to my breath, and his breath, and how it tasted sweet and salty at the same time.

  I didn’t listen for howls or look for tracks. I didn’t wonder if they were out there with Ella, waiting for me. Tonight, I let them wait. Because tonight was the kind of night I’d been waiting for, without even knowing that I had been all along.