The Liar's Guide to the Night Sky

by Brianna R. Shrum

  They had no idea that I watched my dad put on an eighty-dollar button-up and sixty-dollar tie to go to my Uncle Reuben’s twelve-hundred-square-foot house, to tower over him in presence even though Uncle Reuben outweighs him by a good fifty pounds of muscle and fat. They didn’t know, and my dad didn’t know, I could hear him through the door, because I was waiting, shrunken up against the plastic siding of the house, just below the window, instead of in the car where I should have been.

  I’ll never forget wanting to melt down into the mulch when my dad said, “Reuben, I swear to god, if my kid comes home smelling like weed after hanging out with your kid—”

  “Jesus Christ, Uriah.”

  “No. I’m not being unreasonable here. I want her to have a good time with her cousins, but I know what they get up to.”

  “They’re twelve and fourteen.”

  “And shouldn’t be smoking weed and zipping all around the internet doing god knows what—”

  “Oh please, like you weren’t doing drugs and looking at porn when you were a teenager; I lived with you.”

  He lowered his voice and I didn’t shrink; I rose up on my tiptoes to be able to hear better through the glass. “Just. Promise me none of this I don’t care if you drink as long as you do it my house bullshit.”

  “She’s bat mitzvah, Uri. You want me to give her grape juice tonight like a kid?”

  “What?”

  “It’s Friday. It’s Shabbat.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Shabbat. Right. Right, well, I—well, that would. Be fine. But beyond that—”

  “I fucking get it, man.”

  I remember my eyes going so wide I thought they’d pop out of my head. They stung with the force of it. It was the first time I’d ever heard a grown-up drop the f-bomb.

  Uncle Reuben paused, and I could feel the silence like a stone. He said, “You’ve always been an asshole, but—” He lowered his voice so I really had to do my twelvest and strain to eavesdrop in the way only someone twelve and under can to hear the next part. “But you weren’t this afraid for your kid until after I married Adah.”

  Dad was silent. Then he said, “Oh my god, Reuben. Is this . . . is this a race thing? You’re saying I have a problem with you marrying a Black woman? You’re calling me racist?”

  Reuben said, “I’m just telling you what I’m seeing.”

  My whole body was hot. I didn’t really want to think about that kind of thing being applied to my dad, but also . . . also I was sure Uncle Reuben and Aunt Adah had talked about it before now and probably they were . . . probably they were right. In some way.

  I wrapped my arms around myself.

  Just bury me in the ground.

  There was the longest silence I’d experienced theretofore.

  Then my dad said quietly, “I’ll cover dinner for her. And your family if you could use—”

  “Uriah. Just. Do you have somewhere to be?”

  There were footsteps, and I scrambled to get out of the flower bed and up to the little stoop, because it wasn’t like I’d saved myself enough time to sprint back to the car and throw myself through the windshield.

  I’m sure I looked totally not at all suspicious when my dad opened the door and straightened that expensive, starched shirt, and said, “You need to call me to come pick you up, I’ll be here in ten minutes.”

  To Uncle Reuben’s credit, his mouth was only pressed in a furious line for a half a second before he forced it into neutrality.

  I was so freaking nervous, just absolutely sure we had ruined his night. Sure that he was going to be mad at me. That Aunt Adah was going to be upset.

  I clutched my Poe Dameron backpack so hard that the texture of the straps left a pattern on my palm.

  Then he said, “Hey, Hal,” and smiled at me through the biggest, bushiest beard, like a brunette, Jewish Jeremiah Johnson. He’d always been so big and warm, and it was suddenly like my dad hadn’t even been here telling him off.

  I had loosened my grip and flung my arms around his solid middle, and he said, “Jaxon and Jolie are causing trouble inside, but don’t tell your dad.”

  And I laughed and pushed past him into the house, wherein Jaxon and Jolie were most decidedly not causing trouble (until later). They were sitting around watching Young Frankenstein in the half-den downstairs, and when Jolie saw me coming down the three stairs that led to the room, she squealed and threw a pillow at me.

  I bounced down and heard Jonah Ramirez’s voice, yelling at Jolie, “Frau Blucher!”

  And I froze.

  If Dad knew . . .

  But this movie was on and it smelled like popcorn and this house was a third the size of ours but I loved it and Jolie, Jolie above all. Jaxon was my next favorite . . . and honestly, Jonah was so deeply a unit with Jaxon that he was family, too.

  Or something . . . something close enough.

  Aunt Adah said, “Kids? Candle lighting in ten—get up here. I’m pulling challah out of the oven and your father is threatening to say hamotzi for every one of you and eat it all.”

  And of course.

  Of course I stayed.

  All that happened that night was we stayed up too late and played Truth or Dare.

  And we all fell asleep in the den, and Aunt Adah woke me and Jolie and made us go to Jolie’s room, because propriety.

  And well. Dad found out that Jonah had stayed over.

  I don’t think I spent the night at my cousins’ house again until I was sixteen.

  At the time, I’d thought it was my fault.

  I’d kind of blamed Jonah a little, too.

  Now we’re walking together, though, and I know . . . it wasn’t me. It wasn’t Jonah. It was my dad looking for an excuse to hate his brother.

  A hundred miles away and years later, silent in the woods, it’s still affecting us.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “SO. ALLERGIC TO PEANUTS,” he says.

  “Hmmm?”

  “What else?”

  I cock my head at him, mouth tipping up.

  “Smoke.”

  He raises his eyebrow. “You shitting me? Don’t you want to be a firefighter?”

  “Cigarette smoke,” I said. “But look at you, paying attention.”

  He shrugs. “Chick firefighter. It’s kinda hot.”

  I groan, but I like it.

  “That’s sexist probably.”

  He says, “I don’t know what to tell you.”

  “What else have you learned about me?”

  He turns that knife of a smile on me and says, “You fishing, Jacob?”

  “I’m trying to make conversation.”

  “Mmhmm. Well. You’re into dance, right? Like . . . something nerdy, I think. Ballroom?”

  I blush. “Watching it, not doing it.”

  “That’s even nerdier. And I know you’ve got a huge thing for Gene Wilder, you freak.”

  I laugh and shove his arm. “I don’t have a thing for Gene Wilder.”

  “Yeah, you do.”

  He’s right. I do.

  I don’t say anything and his face goes all smug, like he’s not totally freezing and tired.

  He says, “Okay, do me now.”

  I say, “Jonah, that’s so forward.”

  “Christ.” He laughs. Jagged edges and arrogance.

  “You’re an anthropology major.”

  “Easy.”

  “You love football.” He gives me this unimpressed look and follows it up with a dismissive jack-off motion.

  “Oh my god,” I say. He takes a small swallow of his water and I say, “The steel guitar. You would die for the steel guitar.”

  He chokes. “Who told you that?”

  “No one told me.”

  “Bullshit.”

  “Every time Uncle Reuben puts on bluegrass and the cousins make him turn it off, your eyes turn to little hearts. You’re, like, romantically attracted to the steel guitar.”

  “I’m not romantically attracted to anyone, Jacob.”

&
nbsp; “Except the steel guitar.”

  “Christ, never tell anyone.”

  “Scout’s honor,” I say.

  “You’re not a scout.”

  “But I’m honorable.”

  It can’t be intentional when he bumps my shoulder and says, “Bet you’re not that honorable.”

  I scrape my teeth over my lip, but he’s not looking at me anymore; he’s moving ahead, into the wild.

  Every foot we descend, it’s like I can feel the air seeping back into my lungs, so I don’t complain.

  Even though the air’s still thin and my legs hurt and I’m exhausted.

  “You are, though.”

  He laughs. “Honorable?”

  “A scout.”

  He spins around to face me, takes two steps backward to pop me the nerdy-ass Boy Scout salute, and completes the rotation so he’s facing forward again.

  “How the hell does that work?” I say.

  “What? Scouting?”

  “I don’t know.” I shrug. “Just . . . someone like you. In the Boy Scouts.”

  He looks over his shoulder at me and slows a tic so I can catch up. He clutches his hand to his chest. “Jacob, that hurts. What are you skeptical of? My reluctance to wear a uniform or my ability to tie knots?”

  I swallow hard. “Uniform. And like. G-d and country and all of that.”

  He says, “Well thank fuck. I can tie knots like a pro. And I don’t know, fuck patriotism, but I like being around everyone. I like being in the woods.”

  “Mm,” I say.

  “Hate that uniform, though.”

  I grin.

  “You think I don’t believe in G-d?”

  “No,” I say. “I didn’t say that. Scouts just seems like a lot.”

  “I believe in G-d.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Not like glory hallelujah and stuff, I guess. But. Yeah.”

  “Tell me.”

  “What I believe about G-d?”

  I shrug. “Yeah.”

  “You interested in that, really?”

  I furrow my brow. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

  He chews on it for a second, micro-expressions moving over his face in the most fascinating way. “Just—huh, I don’t know. Girls don’t usually get me alone and ask me about theology.”

  “Mm, a little occupied, typically?”

  He smirks. “Something like that.”

  “Well,” I say, “we’re not. We’ve got a whole lot of mountain and even more silence.”

  He runs his tongue over his teeth. “I don’t want to, like, offend you or whatever.”

  “Offend me?”

  He purses his lips and shoves his hands down deep in his pocket. “You’re religious and shit. I don’t want to piss you off.”

  I bark out a laugh. “I’m sorry, I think you’re confusing me with a Not A Jew.”

  He raises an eyebrow.

  “It’s not like you have to believe in G-d to be a Jew.”

  He furrows his brow. “What?”

  “A Jew is a Jew, dude. I could be an atheist or a theist or keep kosher or eat nothing at all but pork and bacon every day, and when I died of scurvy, I’d die a Jew. I can do tzedakah all day every day and then light candles on Shabbos and still decide I wanna play video games, and I’m still a freaking Jew. An observant one. Or a non-observant one. Whatever.”

  “That’s . . .” He scratches the back of his head. “Huh.”

  “You never talked to Jaxon about this? Oh, sorry—Jax.”

  He grins and flips me off, then says, “Nah. We don’t talk about religion a whole lot. I know he cares about it. But that’s about as far as we get.”

  “Well,” I say, shuddering against a quick, cold breeze, “trust me; whatever you have to say, I’ve probably heard it and eighty other opinions from a million rabbis and whatever you think just . . . could not possibly offend me. Not the way it works.”

  “Oh.” He takes a minute to squint up at the sky and just generally be awkward. Then he says, “I uh, I don’t know. I guess I think G-d was probably there once. And now He’s—She’s? They’re—G-d was probably there once and now probably G-d’s got other shit to do.”

  “You think?” I say. If I keep talking, I won’t think about the sharp pain in my stomach and weakness in my legs that are begging me to eat. “G-d exists but forgot about everyone?”

  He shrugs. “Probably intentional. That’s what I’d do. Just go the fuck away, wash my hands of it.”

  “You’re not G-d, though.”

  “I’m just saying, if I made a diorama and it came to life, and then a bajillion years later, I decided to fill it with little dudes who, in the span of five minutes, managed to totally wreck each other and burn down the whole diorama and fuck over everything else I’d put in it, I’d just throw my hands up and leave them to deal with it. That’s exhausting.”

  “That seems . . .” I glance up at the sky. “Lonely.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” I twist my hands in my pockets. “Like if someone intentionally put us here, for a reason, and then left? That feels . . . so abandoned.”

  “Never said G-d made people for a reason. What if G-d was just bullshitting, you know? And we all went wrong?”

  “That’s bleak.”

  “It’s not bleak; it’s reality. Look at us. Look at everyone. Look at what we did, what we do. If there’s a purpose, I bet we fucked it up.”

  “Mmm,” I say. “No. No, I don’t—I don’t think so.”

  “Well,” he says, shoving his hands down in his pockets. His mouth curls up like he’s comfortable, but I can see his jaw clench and lock, can see him shivering, even with the coat. The bright sky has shifted just a little gray while we’ve walked, and I can feel the temperature drop. Just exactly what we needed. He glances up at it, then back forward, to the non-path we’re creating in the snow. “Enlighten me.”

  I say, through my chattering teeth, “I just don’t think there’s like, no point to any of it. I don’t think G-d made people and we went haywire.”

  He raises an eyebrow. “Ice caps are melting, everyone’s shooting each other and bombing each other, everyone’s killing each other and caging each other because they were born on the wrong side of a border. You don’t call that haywire?”

  I shrug, or try. It might be that my shoulders are so stiff, that my blood is so thick and cold, that my arms don’t actually move and I just project a shrug. “It’s bad. It’s messed up, I guess. I know. But I just . . . I guess I think that when it comes down to it, it’s not my job to figure out if the whole world’s fucked; it’s my job to try to make it better.”

  He nudges my arm. “Think you can save the world, huh?”

  “No.” I shake my head because that’s not what I mean, and suddenly this conversation seems like the most important thing in the world. Maybe because it’s so quiet around us, so empty. Like we’re living in a vacuum, like we’re having a conversation in space. Any words get swallowed up the second either of us says them and all that matters is listening until they do. I press my hand into his arm over his coat, curl my fingers, and he stops. I say, “I don’t want to save the world. I just—I want to make it the tiniest bit better. And that’s enough.”

  It’s tikkun olam, repairing the world, and it’s not like I’ve talked about this with my friends. No one wants to sit down and discuss religion, really, and we don’t go to temple much anymore. Mom and Dad stopped having time when I was a kid, when we moved to Massachusetts. But I picked up this much.

  And voicing it makes it feel a little like it’s mine.

  I catch Jonah blinking down at me, not looking above it all, not looking sarcastic for once. His eyes are bright and open and focused.

  Just . . . a little lit up.

  The tiniest spark of fire.

  It doesn’t matter if I blush; I know my nose and cheeks and chin are so red already.

  He says, “Is that why you want to be a firefighter?”

  “Yeah,�
� I say. “Yeah, I guess so.”

  “You guess so?”

  “I’m into the idea of public service.”

  “Of course you are,” he says. “Goody two-shoes.”

  I roll my eyes. “But I’m not a teacher, I’m definitely not a politician.”

  “Not a cop?” he says.

  “Oh Jesus, no,” I say.

  “You sure?”

  “All cops are bastards, Jonah.”

  He actually cackles. It doesn’t mute like I think it should. The endless space doesn’t swallow it whole. It echoes.

  Then it’s nothing but quiet and snowfall.

  I say, “I like the idea of pulling people from burning buildings. I like the physicality. I like the challenge.”

  “Mmm.”

  “And I have a plan.”

  “Well, hit me with it.”

  I say, “I’ve already taken most of my first year of classes. Just another semester and I can be an EMT. Then I can get paramedic certification. If I apply when I’m eighteen, it shouldn’t take too long to get on with the city. I mean, sometimes it does. Everyone wants to be a firefighter from the time they’re six.”

  “Did you?” he says.

  “When I was six? I wanted to be a unicorn.”

  That laugh again—that warms me up every time I hear it, every time I’m the one to make it happen, even though I’m sure he’s laughed like that for a lot of girls.

  I’m sure it doesn’t make me special; it just makes me the girl he’s trapped on a mountain with.

  Still, I’ll take whatever warmth I can get.

  “Anyway,” I say, spine straight now that I’m talking about this, this area I’m in control of, that I’m comfortable with. That I’ve laid out in careful block print since I was fourteen years old. “So anyway, it could take a while, especially in Boston. But if I jump in with my paramedic cert already, that should help. I’ll wait it out in an ambulance until then, gain experience until I can do what I really want.”

  “You’re going back to Boston?”

  “Yeah,” I say, and bitterness I didn’t intend to express creeps into my voice. “Of course. That’s the plan. That’s always been the plan.”

  “You really get off on plans, don’t you, Jacob?”