The Liar's Guide to the Night Sky

by Brianna R. Shrum

I open my eyes and pull back. I want to say something; I try to. But then suddenly I’m crying. I’m just . . . crying.

  Sobbing.

  Like, feel it like a knife in your gut, cannot do anything to quell the total onslaught of pain weeping.

  I actually curl in on myself—grab at my stomach crying so that my hair falls in a tangled sheet around my face.

  Like I need something to hold onto and it might as well be my own skin.

  Jonah steps into me and wraps his arms around me, tight, so I’m bound there against him. So I can fall the hell apart without actually shredding at the seams.

  He holds me together.

  And when I stop crying hard enough to hear him, I can tell that he’s sniffing and not in an it’s cold way. In an I’m fucked up, I’m crying, too kind of way.

  It doesn’t make me feel lonely or fragile or like I don’t have something to hold onto.

  It makes me feel like I’m not alone.

  For once.

  It makes me feel.

  “Jesus,” he says when he finally pulls far enough away to really look at me, “have you just been a total fucking wreck?”

  “YES,” I say, and now I kind of want to laugh. Like everything has been muted for weeks and a thousand things want to burst out of me at once.

  I do start laughing, and Jonah runs his hand over my curls. His mouth turns up and he says, “You spend a week up on a mountain and suddenly it’s like drama happened or something.”

  “Tell me about it. Like please, it’s not as though everything in your entire psyche is different now and you’re fundamentally altered! Get it together!”

  “Honestly. Fuckin’ embarrassing.”

  I laugh a little more, but it’s more like a release of breath, a release of tension.

  Somewhere in the 150 hours we spent up there, that became normal. And everything back here became wrong.

  But with Jonah, in the cold, in the dark woods, I can feel again. I can experience.

  He sits, right there on the cold ground in the middle of the trail, pine needles crunching under his butt.

  I sink down with him.

  “It’s weird, right?” I say.

  He doesn’t have to ask me what. He just says, “Yeah.”

  “I don’t know how to talk to anyone.”

  “I can barely hold a conversation with Jaxon. With Jaxon.”

  I throw my hands in the air. “What is wrong with us?”

  “First guess would be a lot.”

  I smirk. “Don’t forget; I know all your secrets. It’s not a guess.”

  He throws his head back and laughs, and when he looks back at me, it’s like he’s surprised by it.

  “I don’t . . .” I say. “I don’t even know if I want to be a firefighter anymore, Jonah. Like, what the hell? How can one thing like this just change everything? Like my whole . . . my whole personality. I can’t plan anything; I don’t know what I want or how to get it even if I did, and it’s like everything is a huge question mark now.”

  He shrugs. “Probably PTSD or some shit. I don’t know, we’re probably depressed.”

  “Probably.”

  “Therapy would be good, maybe.”

  I repeat, “Probably.”

  He’s quiet.

  I say, “Sounds kind of exhausting, though.”

  “God, right?”

  “I missed you,” I say.

  “I didn’t think I missed anyone,” he says. That stings a little. But then he says, “I can barely feel anything, man. Except then you texted me and it was like . . . well. I was wrong. I missed the hell out of you.”

  My face brightens; I can feel it. “You did?”

  “You’re my friend,” he says. “Like . . . not in the way that Jaxon’s my friend. Or Jolie. Or my quad mates back at school. Or . . . or like anyone else is. It’s different.”

  “Different how?”

  “Different like we shouldn’t be friends, really. It doesn’t make sense. But you know shit about me that other people don’t and we almost fucking died together and you . . . you get it.”

  “I get it,” I whisper.

  His knees are touching mine.

  Part of me wants to ask when class starts back up for him.

  But the other part doesn’t care. Like why does that matter? Why does that matter when we are in the woods together now?

  “You’re still gonna fight fires, Jacob.”

  The easy confidence with which he says it, the familiar use of my last name, the pressure of his knee on mine, give me butterflies.

  “You think?”

  “We’re gonna get therapy and/or brain drugs and/or whatever and do what we have to do and we’re gonna get everything figured out.”

  I dig in the earth just a little, so my fingertips are blacked with dirt, itching with dry pine needles. “I don’t know if that’s true.”

  “Well,” he says, “me neither.”

  I burst out in laughter.

  “Could be total bullshit,” he adds.

  “Oh thanks for that, that helps.”

  He stares at me, smile in his eyes.

  Because, well, it does.

  Maybe it helps for someone else to be unsure.

  My whole life, it’s been map this and that and lay out a chart and navigate this way and this plus this equals the desired outcome, and my whole life in front of me.

  But what matters to me now, in this moment, is the sharp question mark of it all.

  The vast unknowing.

  Jonah leans a little closer to me and says, “I am kind of cold, now that you mention it.”

  “I mentioned it like twenty minutes ago.”

  “I don’t care.”

  I say, “Well, what do you want me to do about it?”

  He shrugs. “I dunno. I kind of like it.”

  I slide so that now his knee pushes into my thigh. He glances down at it.

  It is incredible how a person can be so utterly relaxed and so on alert all at the same time.

  My muscles are uncoiled, my mind is not racing but it’s not numb, it’s right. But I can feel every single movement Jonah Ramirez makes, down to the little lightest shift when he breathes.

  We are shivering here, talking truths in woods we shouldn’t be in, and it feels right.

  Suddenly, I am afraid.

  I am afraid that everything feels right, right here, right now, and the second we get in our cars to leave, all the wrongness will return.

  I will feel like some kind of alien creature who doesn’t know how to exist in her family, with her friends, in a convenience store, on the highway, on the freaking Earth.

  And after this, this thorough hour of belonging, that seems intolerable.

  I quell the train of thought with, “How’s everything with your family?”

  Jonah glances up at the sky. It’s painted with stars. Not in the same way it was on THE MOUNTAIN™, but it glitters enough to draw the eye. He says, “Back to normal.”

  “Same,” I say.

  “It’s weird as hell,” he says.

  I wait.

  “Like everyone else is the same and that’s so . . . fucking impossible. Because how can that be when you’re so . . . so goddamn different? Right?”

  “Yes. Yes.”

  He draws in a breath and stares at the ground, the trees again, the stars again.

  It is full minutes of silence before he says, “We’re gonna have to get out of here eventually.”

  I say, “Yeah.”

  I do not want to.

  I want to stay.

  It is two more minutes before he says, “It’s cold.”

  I shut my eyes and draw in a deep breath. And I stand.

  Jonah stands with me, and this time we walk together.

  I don’t have to run to keep up with him; we step side by side, shoulders brushing, path criss-crossing just a little, in the way that no one really walks a straight line.

  Eventually, the trail entry shows itself, and I jump the gate
first.

  Jonah follows just behind me and walks to his truck.

  He stops.

  Like there’s something he wants to say, and I’m hoping he does because . . . it feels like—it feels like if we drive off now, he’ll go to school and I’ll go home and that will be that.

  This will be something we had and he will be someone I had and it will all be past tense, and we’ll just . . . move on.

  Until I see him sometimes at Jaxon’s.

  It feels like a crossroads.

  Like he will always be Jaxon’s.

  Or he could be mine, too.

  I don’t know why I can’t make myself say anything.

  Jonah twirls his keys over his finger, catches the cold metal. He glances down at his own hand and twirls them again. Opens his mouth.

  Shuts it.

  Opens it again.

  His hand is on the handle to his door.

  I feel it in my chest. The thread between us, tensing, stretching, one more second and it will snap.

  I say, without a story, “Did I ever tell you about the constellation Stormpilot?”

  His mouth twitches up. He looks down at those keys, at the handle.

  He finally says, “You hungry, Jacob?”

  I look back at the woods and bite my lip. “Starving.”

  “Tell me about it at breakfast.”

  He smiles, big and genuine, and I jump in his truck.

  We don’t say much to each other in the closeness of the vehicle, just listen to Tom Morello rage for a while and watch the street signs pass.

  There’s a little twenty-four-hour diner just up Colfax, and I’m certain that’s where he’s going. That’s somewhere our lives have intersected, I guess, though we knew nothing about it.

  He pulls in and parks, and we both take a little too long getting out of the car.

  There’s a couple people in the diner besides us.

  It feels strange and right all at once.

  It’s warm in here, and brightly lit, and smells like cinnamon and okay eggs and decent coffee—like a twenty-four-hour diner on the middle of Colfax.

  The waitress brings us coffee without either of us asking.

  Jonah opens a menu, and so do I, and I settle into the softness of the seat across from him.

  My foots brushes his calf and he doesn’t pull back.

  The waitress asks our order.

  I want cinnamon rolls. He wants steak and eggs, which I am certain will be pretty shitty—who orders steak at a diner?

  It is so . . . regular.

  I don’t tell him about Stormpilot.

  Jonah clears his throat and sips his coffee and says, “This is kind of shitty, huh?”

  I laugh. “Yeah, it sucks.” And I take a huge drink.

  He looks sleepy and disheveled and comfortable, and like everyone looks under fluorescents.

  He grins at me.

  I eat my incredible cinnamon roll and he starts on his mediocre steak, and at first it’s so quiet that all we can do is listen to the other diners’ conversations.

  But somewhere between bites, one of us has started talking about school.

  About EMT work.

  About that movie that could be the best thing to have ever been written or the literal worst.

  Somewhere between 3:00 and 4:00 a.m., our stomachs are full and I have shed my coat and he keeps kicking me under the table.

  I light up at the touch.

  I laugh when he says something stupid, and he laughs when the waitress spills water on me.

  I drink another shitty cup of coffee.

  I am alive.

  The End.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A stormy book for a somewhat stormy time in my life. Thank you so much to those who helped me weather it, in a million different ways. First, my agent, Steven Salpeter. You are, as always, a force of encouragement and belief and indispensable advice on tea. (Two tea bags for Irish breakfast! What a revelation.) Holly Frederick and Maddie Tavis, I could not ask for two lovelier humans to have in my corner. Thanks so much for going above and beyond for me and my wild little books. To my editor, Nicole Frail, you are an absolute delight to work with. I am so grateful to have the chance to tell stories with you. To Nicole Mele and the rest of the amazing team at Skyhorse, thanks so much for every single thing you do to make my years-long dream of becoming an author a continuing reality.

  Thank you to Colleen Oakes for constantly being a wonderful writing friend and providing support and critique and the warmest friendship from three thousand miles away. To Rae Loverde, Slytherin badass love, wonderful friend for the texts that cross like ships in the night, and for everything you did and always do to help me and my words. You are indispensable.

  TO YOU, gentle and punk rock reader. Here’s to you. A toast of whatever beverage you’re into. Thanks for everything. Everything.

  And last, not least, family. Humans with whom I cohabitate. Blur, thanks for the phrase “that’s white people shit.” Boys, Mal and E, you are what makes everything worth it. And Sara, well. Critique partner, co-writer, fave, actual not in any way related family: *nose wrinkle* You invited me into your home on PURPOSE; you did this to YOURSELF.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo by Taylor Whitrock

  BRIANNA R. SHRUM has been writing since she could scrawl letters. She digs all things bookish, geeky, superhero-y, gamer-y, magical, and strange. You can usually find her writing under her Harry Potter tree, and drinking chai (which she holds as proof of magic in the world). She is also the author of Kissing Ezra Holtz (And Other Things I Did for Science), How to Make Out, The Art of French Kissing, and Never Never. She lives in a Charlotte suburb in South Carolina, with her favorite people.