Starlight

by Chelsea M. Campbell

  Starlight

  by Chelsea M. Campbell

  1st edition published by Golden City Publishing, 2014

  Copyright © 2014 Chelsea M. Campbell

  www.chelseamcampbell.com

  Cover art by Karen Kincy

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher and copyright owner.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Books by Chelsea M. Campbell

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Chapter Twenty-three

  Chapter Twenty-four

  Chapter Twenty-five

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Books by Chelsea M. Campbell

  Renegade X

  The Rise of Renegade X

  The Trials of Renegade x

  Harper Madigan: Junior High Private Eye

  Growing Up Dead

  Starlight

  Dedication

  For Karen, for making me promise to publish this.

  Chapter One

  I’m working the drive-thru window when Nichole and her posse pull up. Nichole is blond and pretty and popular—everything I’m not. Don’t forget drama queen, cheerleader, and, oh yeah, a bitch.

  If I was one of the Nicholes of the world, I’d tell her that to her face. But I’m Adrienne Speck. Quiet, shy, and invisible.

  Okay, I lied. I used to be invisible. I wish I was invisible. Up until right before winter break, I was. I’ll admit, the fall from paradise was my fault. When Mrs. Grady encouraged me to submit my poem in the contest, I got a little starry-eyed. She even convinced me to be the poetry contest’s spokesperson and read my entry out loud in front of an audience. I didn’t realize it would be the whole school. I should have known better, especially after what happened in my old town. It violated my “don’t get noticed” policy. Now I know never to veer from my Prime Directive. Take my advice—when you have a nice level of invisibility going, and someone wants you to flicker into everyone else’s radar, just say no. It’ll save you a lot of grief.

  Today is the last day of winter break. School starts tomorrow. After two weeks off, maybe no one will remember the poetry incident. Maybe they won’t still be laughing.

  Like they’re laughing now.

  Nichole and her friends giggle every time they look at me through the drive-thru window. And it’s not just because I look silly in my Flame Burgers hat, the one with the cartoony dragon mascot printed across the visor.

  I’ve only been in this town five months, and already the meanest girl in school has decided she can’t stand me. It’s just like before. Me and this girl, Jenna, we used to be friends, back in elementary school. And then in junior high her dork radar grew in, and, well, let’s just say we no longer shared the same interests. Mainly because hers involved teasing me and getting other people to do it, too. It was a great social booster for her—not so much for me.

  Sometimes I wish I was like Nichole and Jenna. Not mean or anything, but, you know, popular. When you’re popular, you can say whatever you want, and nobody puts you down for it. If Nichole had written that poem, I bet nobody would have laughed.

  Nichole clears her throat, like she’s going to make a big speech. “Hey, lonely little Speck.” She says it like she means it. I feel like a speck, and I mean in the lowercase sense, not the familial pride kind. Nichole clasps her hands together and recites in a baby voice, “‘Life is just so sad sometimes. It’s like emptiness grows on trees.’” Hearing words from my own poem thrown back at me, twisted and ugly and dorkier than they’ve ever been, I wonder again how I could have been so stupid.

  Nichole’s breath looks like smoke in the cold air, like a dragon getting ready to breathe fire. She can smile and cackle at the same time—now that’s talent. Her cronies are laughing, too. A lot. Maybe I should just be glad they remember a line of my poetry, even if they screwed it up.

  I shove their drinks into a holder. My face heats up, and my throat clenches. I pass the drink holder out the window to Nichole. My ears are red hot and burning.

  Nichole glares at me, tapping her fake, bright red nails on the door of her bright red VW Bug. Like she’s waiting for a tip. Or maybe for me to throw myself in front of her car, so she can just run me over and be done with it.

  “Poor little emo girl,” Amanda, a copy of Nichole, mutters. There are so many copies of Nichole, I think there must be some kind of secret robot factory that makes them for her. She must get a discount for buying in bulk—that’s why she has so many.

  Nichole snaps her fingers at me. “Hello?” She waves a hand over the drinks. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  My heart pounds and my nerves freeze up. I feel like less than a speck.

  Nichole rolls her eyes at me. “Straws?”

  “Oh, right.” I scramble to do her bidding. I grab about ten straws and stuff them into Nichole’s waiting hand. All four girls in the car burst into laughter. Nichole shoots me a nasty fake smile before pressing on the gas and zooming out of the drive-thru, leaving a huge cloud of smog in her wake. I cough, literally eating her dust.

  Thanks, life. Thanks a lot.

  “Why do you let Bimbo Barbie treat you like that?” Pam, one of my co-workers, takes my headset, and I slide out of my work jacket and hand it to her.

  “It’s nothing.”

  Pam’s about ten years older than me. She thinks high school’s a joke. If she were me, she’d probably punch Nichole in the nose and laugh. “Girl, listen to me. You don’t have to take that crap from anyone.”

  I pretend like I don’t hear her. I could point out that she’s working here, just like me. Minimum-wage fast-food job? More like professional crap-taker. “I’m taking my ten.”

  She breathes out a long, disappointed sigh. So what else is new?

  Coal in my stocking would have been a step up this Christmas. All I got were lifelong reservations for Loserville, party of one.

  Chapter Two

  Just once it would be nice to get home after an afternoon of torment and drudgery and find my mom standing in the doorway in an apron, offering me a plate of warm cookies and a hug. And yeah, okay, maybe the apron is a little too June Cleaver, but all I’m looking for is a little comfort after a long shift at the drive-thru window, where each customer sucks out a little bit more of my soul. But instead of even greeting me, Mom’ s sitting at the kitchen table with none other than Nichole’ s mom, Mrs. Hamilton. Great. The mother of my arch-nemesis, comparing notes with mine.

  I shouldn’t complain about my mom. After all, my dad died when I was little, so it’s always been just me and her. She’s single and she works hard. She used to be part of the popular crowd when she was in school, and it’s not her fault her only daughter doesn’t live up to her legacy. It’s not her fault I come home from school most days with pen and paper in my hands instead of pink pompoms.

  They say the apple
doesn’t fall far from the tree, but I think mine must have rolled down a really steep hill. My mom’s a “Candi,” never a Candace. I’m just Adrienne.

  Mom doesn’t hear me come in. I pause at the bottom of the stairs. They can’t see me, but I can hear them.

  “Oh, Nichole made head cheerleader this year—I’m sure you’ve heard—and she’s trying out for the play this week.” Mrs. Hamilton laughs. “She’s worried she won’t get it, you know how kids are, but she’s a shoo-in for the lead. Like always.”

  Mrs. Hamilton and my mom went to high school together. They were best friends, and they even kept in touch afterwards. Mrs. Hamilton was ecstatic when we moved back to Mom’s hometown this year, after Mom found a really cool job just a couple miles away. I hadn’t been here since I was two. I have to say, it’s not exactly how I remembered it. In my version, people were a lot nicer.

  I slump against the wall and start unbraiding my hair. I have to keep it bound up when I’m at work, plus it fits through the back of my hat better that way.

  “So, what’s your little darling up to these days?” Mrs. Hamilton loves hearing about how inferior I am to Nichole. She knows that her best friend’s apple is all smudged up and wormy, instead of a bright and shiny pinnacle of progeny.

  I imagine I can hear my mom grinding her teeth together. “She’s, well, Adrienne’s not much of a…”

  People person? Boy magnet? Attention seeker?

  “…she’s just a late bloomer.”

  I can hear the disappointment in her voice. It’s bad enough that everyone at school thinks I’m a big loser. My mom has to think so, too. She wouldn’t tell me to my face or anything, but I can tell. I can tell she thinks I must have been switched at birth.

  ***

  I’m not crying. Only a loser would be sitting at her desk in her room, staring at the last existing copy of her awful poem and holding back tears. Only a loser would be reading each word over and over, thinking of how stupid it was of her to write it in the first place. The line Nichole got wrong goes like this:

  So much emptiness

  Like it grows on trees.

  Hollowing them out until they’re nothing but bone skeletons

  For somebody else to live in.

  I’ll admit that it’s emo, and it goes on like that. But I put everything I had into it. And when Mrs. Grady told me how wonderful she thought it was, about how it really stood out from all the others, I couldn’t help wanting to believe her. In it. In me. But I guess everything I had wasn’t good enough.

  I already deleted the copy on my hard drive. It was the first thing I did after I read my poem in front of the whole school and got laughed off stage. I hunted down the backup copy I emailed to myself and deleted that, too. I wanted to destroy every trace of my vile work, but when it came to the hard copy, I didn’t have the guts. All I could bring myself to do was scratch out the words with a blue pen. My heart must not have been in it, because I can still read them pretty easily through the scribbles.

  This one piece of paper is all that separates me from the hell of the last couple weeks and the road back to invisibility. I stand up, shoving my chair behind me, and rip the poem in half right down the middle. I like the shredding sound the paper makes. Maybe when I grow up I’ll get a job in demolition. A real goddess of destruction. Destroying things is nice and safe, embarrassment-wise. Nobody laughs when you take things apart. It’s only when you’re building things up that you have anything to worry about.

  I wad up the poem, now in two pieces, and hurl it into the wastepaper basket as hard as I can. Which isn’t very hard. The thud it makes as it hits the bottom isn’t really a thud at all. It’s dull and disappointing.

  Chapter Three

  They say elephants never forget—they should try teenagers. Everyone’s had two weeks off from school to forget about me, but clearly it wasn’t enough. Things have gotten a little better—the pointing and staring when I pass through the halls has mostly died down—but people still giggle and glance away whenever they see me.

  There’s only half an hour left until the day is over. I’ve got English last period. With Mrs. Grady. She doesn’t know it yet, but we’re no longer on speaking terms. Let her just try and ask me something about the novel we were supposed to read over the break. I’ll look right into her eyes and say, “No, Mrs. Grady, I didn’t read it. I know how awful your recommendations are.”

  Of course I read it. Like, the first day of break. It was short, only about two hundred pages. I could read that in my sleep. Not that I’m going to admit it. Not only do I not want to give Mrs. Grady the satisfaction, but probably only five people out of the thirty kids in this class actually read the whole thing. Nobody wants to own up to being nerdy enough to read assigned material over Christmas vacation. It’s like wearing a big sign that says you had nothing better to do, that you have no life whatsoever.

  The book was called Starstruck. It was a story about a star who falls to Earth and turns into a human girl. Then this boy falls for her, and he only has so much time before he has to say he loves her, or else she’ll disappear forever. Only, because of the spell she’s under, she can’t tell him that. She can’t tell him what will happen, or that she loves him, too.

  It was like The Little Mermaid, only not the Disney version. The real version. If you’ve ever heard that story, then you know how this one ended: not very happily ever after.

  “Adrienne.” Mrs. Grady pauses in front of my desk. She smiles at me. She says my name in a sweet voice, like she doesn’t realize she’s talking to a pariah. One determined to ignore her. “I know you read it.”

  Remember that plan I had? The one where I tell her off for luring me down the path of heartbreak? Forget that. My mouth stays closed, and all I can do is nod. I wonder if other people actually say the cool things they mean to, or if they chicken out a lot, like me.

  “Good. At least that makes two of us.” She strolls back and forth in front of the class, looking for someone to call on. She has her eye on me, but I slump down in my seat. I avoid eye contact at all cost, and she moves on. She points to someone a couple seats behind me. “Toby, will you read the opening lines, please?”

  Toby clears his throat. He’s in my math class, too. He has dark hair and glasses, and he always turns his homework in on time. I bet he read the whole thing. You could say we belong to the same social class. I wonder if he laughed when I read my poem, or if he felt a pang of nerd sympathy.

  The room is pretty much quiet as he opens up a battered copy of the novel. Everyone takes turns glancing at the clock. You can feel the boredom in the room, like people breathe it into the air when they yawn.

  “‘When the star fell to Earth, nobody loved her. She was alone. And a star unloved cannot survive outside of the sky—that was the number one rule. The rule that would turn her into stardust if she remained unloved much longer.’”

  Toby pauses for breath, and the intercom comes on with an announcement before he can start up again. The principal’s voice blares, tinny and squawky, over our heads. “Attention, students. The results of the poetry contest are in. The following students will continue on to the regional competition, which will be held here at our very own Highville High next week. Our semi-finalists are…”

  Blah blah blah. I have better things to do than think about poetry ever again, like stare at the clock. Each tick is another moment check-marked off my sentence. I don’t have work tonight, and there are only ten more minutes until total freedom.

  “…Adrienne Speck…”

  I glance up. Somebody said my name. Somebody talking through a tinny-sounding intercom. Somebody I so didn’t want to say it.

  The boredom drains out of the room, and everyone snaps awake. I’ve earned a special place in Hell, where you don’t get fifteen minutes of fame, but an eternity of infamy.

  “Speck won,” somebody says, sounding about as shocked as I am.

  “Maybe no one else entered.”

  “Yeah, they saw what the
ir competition was,” one of the boys in the back of the room says, his voice oozing with sarcasm. “She must have scared them off.”

  The sarcasm I could take, but then a girl behind me stage-whispers, “I bet they felt sorry for her.”

  Any hope that my poem wasn’t as revolting as I thought vanishes like an unloved star. I swallow down a lump of anger and self-pity rising in my throat. That explains it. The judges must have felt bad, because I was supposed to be the spokesperson of the contest, and look what it got me. Go ahead, they thought, let her into the finals, give the poor girl a break. They didn’t know they were doing me the opposite of a favor.

  Even Mrs. Grady’s mouth is hanging open, like she’s finally realizing the horror she’s inflicted on me. It’s about time.

  If I was the dramatic type, I’d grab my things and hurry out of the room. But then everyone would know how much it hurt. Then I’d look like I care.

  But I’m no drama queen. I am Adrienne Speck, and turning into stardust sounds pretty good right now.

  Chapter Four

  After dinner, I put on my thick brown coat and slip on my gloves. Mom wants “to talk.” I don’t have to ask what she wants to talk about. After chatting with Nichole’s mom, she’s got audition posters in her eyes. She’s got visions of sending all our relatives pictures of me all costumed up, spouting out rehearsed lines like I mean it. Like I’m somebody else.

  “Just try a little,” she’ll say. Try. I don’t need to tell you that “trying” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Unless you use its other meaning, and then I am definitely trying my mother’s patience.

  I tell her I’m going for a walk. It’s dark and cold out, but the sky is clear, and the stars are shining. There are so many of them. I tilt my head back and think about how big and bright they are, and about how small and dull I am in comparison. I wish I wasn’t. I close my eyes and wish as hard as I can that I was as bright as they are. My hands clench and my teeth grind together, that’s how hard I’m wishing. For a moment, there’s only me in the whole world—just me and these stabbing pains of want. Just me and the fact that I’d give anything to matter. The feeling is so strong that when I open my eyes, I half expect something to have happened. It hasn’t. So much for wishing on a star.