Every Soul a Star

by Wendy Mass

  I didn’t realize I had agreed to anything. The two mothers turn toward the bulletin board to look at the chart of available high-end cabins, ignoring us both. I can’t believe that in the span of half an hour I went from jumping for joy over the possibility of discovering that we are not alone in the universe, to feeling like all the air has been sucked out of my body. I know I should cry, should be screaming to the rafters at the unfairness of it all, but I’m just numb. It feels so unreal.

  I turn on my heel and Bree follows me. We don’t speak as I lead her around to the front of the house. As we’re about to enter, Ryan approaches from the other side. “Hey, Ally!” he says, heading toward us. He stops short when he sees Bree. I swear his mouth drops open a bit. Bree just stands there, lids half closed like she’s bored, while he looks her up and down. I guess Bree is what a hottie looks like. She probably doesn’t realize how pretty she is. Ryan doesn’t even notice that my hand is shaking so hard on the doorknob that the whole door rattles on its hinges.

  “I’ll see you at dinner, Ryan, okay?” Not waiting for an answer, I herd Bree inside and upstairs. Kenny must still be at Alien Central. If I see him I’m going to have to run the other way.

  When we get to my room she takes it in with one glance, then throws herself down on my bed. Good thing I had actually made the bed today. This morning seems like a lifetime ago. “You’re SO lucky you’re getting out of here,” she says, staring at the ceiling. “It’s like you’re getting sprung from jail. I can’t even BELIEVE this is my life now.”

  I can’t believe I heard her correctly. I can feel the heat rise to my face. “Jail? I’m lucky to be leaving? You’re lucky to be coming! The Moon Shadow is the best place on the planet to live. And I can’t believe this is your life now, either. This is supposed to be MY life.”

  She bolts upright. “I totally don’t want your life. Trust me on that one. I don’t mean to be rude or anything, but you’re crazy! Why would anyone want to live out here? There’s nothing to do.”

  “I don’t mean to be rude either,” I reply, choosing my words carefully, “but there’s EVERYTHING to do here. Everything that matters, anyway.”

  Bree stares at me for so long I start to feel uncomfortable. In my own room! I turn away and start pulling things out of my drawers that might fit her. Everything looks drab and ragged next to her clothes. I never noticed my clothes were so dull before.

  “Look,” Bree says, her voice a little less cold. “You obviously like this place, for reasons I can’t personally imagine. I really, really don’t want to live here. Maybe we can work together.”

  I close my drawer and turn to face her. “What do you mean?”

  She sits up on the bed. “Like we can make a plan. You know, to get our parents to change their minds. Like they did in The Parent Trap.”

  “The what?”

  She looks at me like I’m from outer space. “The Disney movie?”

  I shake my head.

  She sighs. “It’s this movie about these two twins who were separated at birth, each to live with one parent. They meet up at summer camp and decide to scheme to get their parents back together. Don’t you get cable up here?”

  “We don’t have a television.”

  Her eyes become huge. She groans and flops forward on the bed again, pressing her face into my blanket.

  “And, um, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we’re not twins.”

  “I’ve noticed,” Bree says, her voice muffled. “That’s not the point. Are you in, or not?”

  “Do you really think it would work?”

  “It HAS to work,” she says, pushing herself up. “It just HAS to. I will shrivel up and die if I have to live here. No offense.”

  “Uh-huh.” Clearly I’m going to have to let remarks like that go if we’re going to be working together. “Okay,” I tell her. “Let’s do it.”

  “Good!” she says. She whips out a cell phone, presses some keys, and stares at the screen. “Wait, why isn’t my text going through?”

  “No reception up here.”

  “What?” she practically shrieks. “How will I call anyone? How will I text my friends?”

  I shrug and leave to get her a towel from the hall closet. I don’t understand how “texting” works or why someone would want to do it. But I don’t want her to think I’m even more out of the loop than I obviously am. I grab the softest towel from the hall closet. I should tell her that she can bathe in the hot springs behind the house if she wants, instead of the boring shower. She’d probably jump at the chance, because who wouldn’t? It’s always warm, and there’s lots of privacy. But I don’t want to share the hot springs with her. In fact, I don’t really want to share anything with her. This makes me feel guilty, because Mom and Dad taught us that the planet and everything on it (and above it, like the stars, and below it, like the springs) is meant to be shared. But still!

  When I come back to the room Bree is facedown on the bed again, her body shaking with tiny sobs. I tip-toe back out and close the door. I wish I could understand why someone wouldn’t want to live here, but I can’t. A flood of images makes me lean back onto the door for support. The labyrinth with its graceful, peaceful circles, the Art House where hundreds of guests over the years have painted their life stories on the walls, the Sun Garden with its magical way of turning shafts of light into time. And then it hits me with such force that I almost can’t breathe—I won’t be able to see the constellations in the city! The light pollution will blot out almost everything. Instead of the full glory of Orion, with his sword and his shield, all I’ll be able to see are the three stars of his belt. I might not even see the Big Dipper or the North Star. Without the North Star, how will I know where I am? Stickers of the solar system on my ceiling aren’t going to cut it.

  I drop the towel on the bathroom counter, hold tight to the pouch around my neck, and weep.

  BREE

  4

  I was wrong. This place isn’t Purgatory. It’s the other place. The hot one with the pitchforks and the flames and the ragged clothes. I already have three bites on each ankle. Once I took my shower (which turned lukewarm only minutes after stepping in), I went back to Ally’s room and have refused to leave it. Believe me, there’s not much to look at, and I’ve looked at everything. Many times. If anyone asked me, I could probably tell them the shapes of all those blobs on the poster on her door. According to the poster, which I’ve now read at least fifty times, the blobs are galaxies and clusters and nebulae out in space somewhere. I’ve heard of galaxies of course, but have no idea what the others are, and I don’t want to know. Anything science-related belongs to the rest of my family. They don’t think about how to dress (although they really should), and I don’t think about anything scientific. It’s just how it is.

  It had taken a while to find something of Ally’s that I could wear. Everything was so . . . bland. It looked like it had all been washed together so many times it had blended into one shade of grayish-blue. Everything was loose fitting, and I finally selected a pair of shorts (which are probably long on her but are short on me) and the t-shirt with the most color left in it.

  I feel like I’m wearing pajamas.

  I do my daily fifty sit-ups, wishing with every one that I was lying on the soft pink carpet in my bedroom instead of Ally’s unforgiving wooden floor.

  My stomach tells me it’s dinnertime, but I still can’t make myself leave the room. As long as I stay in here, I can pretend I’m in a classmate’s bedroom back at home. Some unfortunate girl who just moved to town and didn’t know how to decorate. I’m here because we got stuck doing a history project together. Any minute her mother will bring us milk and cookies and I’ll politely tell her I don’t eat cookies.

  But when a knock does come on the door, it’s Ally. She sticks her head in and says, “Can I come in?”

  “It’s your room.”

  Ally comes in and sits at her desk chair. Her eyes are puffy. For some reason that makes me feel a little
better. Not that I want someone else to suffer, of course. But it makes me feel better that I’m not the only one who’s miserable. She glances at my outfit, but doesn’t say anything. She seems like a nice enough kid. Totally backwoods though, like, I doubt she’s ever been to a mall in her life. If her wardrobe wasn’t so totally out of style, and if she brushed her hair and wore some lip gloss, she might even be pretty. I can’t even give her a rating though, because she’s at such a disadvantage here.

  “Why don’t we go down to dinner in the pavilion,” she says. “We’re having a barbecue for the first busload of eclipse chasers. You must be hungry.”

  I shake my head stubbornly. “I don’t want to see my parents. And who, or what, are eclipse chasers?”

  Ally raises her brows but says, “Eclipse chasers are people who travel around the world to see eclipses. There’s about one a year, somewhere in the world. But sometimes they’re in really hard-to-reach places, like a mountaintop, or in the middle of oceans, or by the South Pole or something.”

  “Or in the middle of nowhere like this place?”

  “Believe it or not, this place is pretty easy to get to compared to most of them. That’s why we’re so busy. If you were in the next town over, you wouldn’t be able to see it. I mean, you’d see something, like a partial eclipse, but that’s not any good because you can’t even look at it directly. The path of the rest of the eclipse is all up in Canada. Aren’t you excited to see it?”

  I shrug. I hadn’t given it much thought. Like, none. “If our plan works, I might not even be here for it.”

  She gasps. “You’d leave here BEFORE the eclipse? But it . . . it’s the most amazing thing you’ll ever see.”

  I cross my arms. “The most amazing thing I’ll ever see is that horrible van of my dad’s pulling into my old driveway back home.”

  She shakes her head at me. I honestly don’t care if she doesn’t understand. I’m not here to make friends. I’ve had a chance to think about the plan over the last few hours, and I have some good ideas. “Look, let’s just go to dinner and we’ll sit by ourselves and work on our plan.”

  She nods. “That’s fine. I don’t want to sit with my family either.”

  “Okay then. And we’ve got to come up with two different plans of attack—one for your parents to convince them to stay, and one for mine to convince them to leave. They both have to change their minds or else it won’t work since they have a written agreement.”

  “They do?” Ally asks, clearly not happy about this formality.

  I nod. “My dad showed it to us back home. Full of boring lawyer-type clauses. You really had no idea about any of this?”

  Ally shakes her head miserably. “I knew something was up, because my parents were acting a little weird. But I never, ever would have guessed this. I know you hate it here, but I love it. I barely remember living anywhere else. And Kenny was born here. How come your sister seems so happy to be here?”

  How could I explain Melanie? “My sister thinks everything is a game. She’s really smart, in school and stuff, but when it comes to real life she just doesn’t think about things.”

  “I wish I didn’t have to think about real life right now,” Ally says wistfully.

  “You won’t have that choice when you get to be my age.”

  Ally puts her hands on her hips. “I AM your age. Well, practically. I’ll be thirteen in two months.”

  “Really? I thought you were younger. Sorry.”

  Ally sighs. “It’s okay.”

  “Maybe if you wore a little makeup . . .”

  “Makeup? Why?”

  Wow, this girl and Melanie would get along really well. “Um, because makeup makes people look better? And older, too.”

  She looks at me intently, like she’s actually thinking about it. Then she says, “Should we really be talking about makeup at a time like this?”

  I swing my legs off the bed, ready for action. “You’re right. We need a notebook and a pen. If anyone asks what we’re doing, you can say you’re drawing a diagram of the place for me.” I head for the door. It feels better having a purpose.

  “Don’t you want to change?” Ally says, pulling out long pants and a nondescript blue jacket.

  “Why? It’s still hot out, right?”

  She tosses me the jacket and pants. “Trust me, you’ll want these. It gets really buggy at dusk.”

  “Great,” I mutter, pulling at my shorts. Ally turns around quickly to face the other way. I’m so used to trying on clothes with my friends, crammed into one tiny dressing room, that I don’t think twice about changing in front of people. The memory of the laughs we used to have in those dressing rooms makes my eyes sting with tears. I refuse to cry anymore though. Especially in front of Ally, who is being very brave for someone in her position. As much as I would rather live in my old town, I wouldn’t want to enter middle school on the bottom of the social ladder, which is clearly where Ally will be if we don’t change things.

  I pull on the pants, slip on the jacket, and feel even less like myself than I did before. “Hey,” I say to Ally as she goes to open the door. “Why didn’t you change?” She’s still wearing the bland wrinkled shorts and bland wrinkled t-shirt that I first saw her in. “Do you want privacy or something?”

  Ally shakes her head. “I’m immune to mosquitoes for some reason. Always have been. I’ll be fine.”

  If it were anyone else I’d think they just didn’t want to cover up, but Ally clearly doesn’t care what she looks like. I didn’t even SEE a brush in her bathroom.

  “You’ll want these, too,” she says, tossing me a pair of sneakers from her closet. “You won’t last long in those sandals.” She hands me a pair of socks, too. I can’t remember the last time I wore socks. They do cover up my bitten-up ankles though. I stare at the old sneakers and then reluctantly put them on too. They’re a little tight, and so dirty I can’t even tell what color they used to be.

  I feel like I’m wearing a costume, one that doesn’t quite fit right. I follow her outside and down the road toward the dining area. Even the air feels different here. Thinner or thicker or something. It’s unnerving.

  My parents are standing at the entrance to the eating area, which is really nothing more than a whole bunch of picnic tables under a big tin roof.

  “I tried to call you,” Mom says, “but I couldn’t get a signal.”

  I don’t answer.

  “Are you feeling better?”

  I grunt. Ally steps aside to talk to her friend, the one who checked me out before.

  “I like your outfit,” Dad says.

  “Haha, very funny.”

  “Seriously,” he insists. “You look very natural. Outdoorsy, even.”

  They are all dressed in their same shorts and t-shirts. Melanie is already scratching at her legs. They still have that same happy glint in their eyes, which drives me crazy. I refrain from suggesting they cover up.

  Ally comes back and says a polite hello to my family. Mom asks if she wants to join us for dinner. Ally looks to me, helpless. “Actually Ally and I are going to eat on our own. C’mon, Ally.” I pull her away before anyone can argue.

  Mom calls out after us, “I’m glad you two are getting along!”

  I keep walking until Ally points to a table in the far corner.

  “You wait here,” she instructs. “I’ll get us some burgers.” Then she hesitates. “You do eat meat, right?”

  “Why wouldn’t I?”

  She shrugs. “I don’t know.”

  Why do people always assume that skinny people don’t eat? “I eat plenty,” I insist. And then without knowing why, I add, “I want to be a model one day, so I do have to watch my weight.”

  She looks curious. “What kind of model?”

  “A model, you know. Fashion shows, commercials, magazine ads.”

  She tilts her head in thought. “You’re really pretty and all, but why would you want to do that?”

  “Why wouldn’t I want to do that?
” I look her straight in the eye, daring her to put down my career choice, my passion. To her credit, she doesn’t look away. At least she said I was pretty. It’s been hours since anyone noticed that.

  “I’m sorry,” she says softly. “I’m just not myself. It’s none of my business what you want to do. It’s not like it’s any stranger than what I want to do.”

  “Which is what?”

  “You’ll just think I’m weird.”

  “Ally, nothing you could say would make me think you are anything BUT weird. So you might as well tell me.”

  She glares at me, or at least she tries. It looks more like she’s trying to hypnotize me. I don’t think she has much experience glaring.

  “Okay, fine. I want to discover a comet. I’ll settle for an asteroid. But they’re much more common so it’s not as huge a deal as a comet.”

  I honestly have no response for that. And I usually have a response for everything. “That’s, um, interesting,” I finally manage. “You can do that for a living?”

  She looks surprised at that answer, like she never thought about it before. “I . . . I don’t know,” she says. “I guess maybe you can’t.”

  Her face kind of sags and I’m afraid she’s going to cry. Poor girl. So out of touch with the world. She clutches onto a tattered blue pouch around her neck like it gives her some kind of strength. I’m used to comforting my friends when things go wrong for them—the guy they like likes someone else, bad grade on a test, bad hair day. But I don’t have any experience in comforting someone whose world is being turned upside down. If I did, I’d be able to comfort myself. I manage to say, “Um, it’s okay, Ally. I’m sure you’ll figure something out.”

  She nods, clearly not convinced. Then she places her notebook on the table and heads toward the barbecue line. I watch her go and catch sight of her friend checking me out again. He’s definitely cute. This year’s jeans, Abercrombie long-sleeved top. A full-on 9.2. The extra point-two is for the spiky hair. He reminds me of the guys at home, and anything that reminds me of home right now is a good thing. I’m about to do the glance up, smile, look away routine when I remember what I look like right now. No hair dryer for my hair, nail polish already chipped, these shapeless clothes. I quickly pick up Ally’s notebook and flip through it. Hopefully he’ll think I’m hard at work and won’t bother me. At least not until tomorrow after my clothes have shown up.