American Girl On Saturn (18 page)

Mom places the waxy pieces onto the table and uses her fingernail to scrape off the gray mark on the table. She looks exhausted, just from picking up a broken crayon. She looks up at the three of us, and she sighs one of those heavy, defeated breaths before sitting back down at the end of the table.

“I never thought we’d be here,” Mom says. “I knew Emery would throw a fit after lockdown ended, but I never expected you, of all people, to even care about Spaceships Around Saturn.”

Aralie crosses her arms and doesn’t say a word. What has gotten into her? No defensive arguments…no explanations. She just stands there.

Emery gasps. “Aralie is a Saturnite? Like me and Chloe?”

“Chloe?” Mom and Aralie say my name simultaneously.

All eyes descend on me, and I want to crawl under the table. I could deny it, but what good would that do? That’d just make me look like a Saturnite-in-denial. So I counterattack with the only weapon in my arsenal.

“Thanks a lot, Harry Styles,” I say to my traitor of a baby sister.

“Chloe!” she yells. “You weren’t supposed to tell them that I like Harry Styles!”

Aralie laughs. “She didn’t. You just did.”

“Chloe…tricked…me.” Emery says the words through clenched teeth.

Mom buries her face into her hands, much like how Benji does when Emery bugs the hell out of him at breakfast.

Emery’s entire face shakes, and although I know she’s doing it on purpose to portray her anger, she still looks freakishly scary. She jumps down from her chair and stomps across the room toward me.

“Well, you know what?” she asks me with an attitude that reminds me of Aralie. She looks around the room. “Chloe said Milo was the best singer in Spaceships Around Saturn, and she wears the same colors as him, so…”

Then she looks back at me. “You’re
gonna be stuck with him foreverrrr, and you’ll have to marry him, and that sucks for you because he’s boring!”

She bolts around me and up the stairs before I can say a word. I just stand here, somewhat in shock and somewhat in amusement. Being stuck with Milo forever? Sorry, Emery, but that absolutely does
not
suck for me.

I bet she’s up in her bedroom daydreaming about our future weddings – mine to Milo and hers to Benji – and laughing at my misfortune.

“See?” Mom asks. “It won’t take her long to get back to typical Emery once lockdown is over. The guys have only been gone for a few hours, and she seems like herself again.”

Aralie groans. “Don’t remind me,” she says. “Chloe, why’d you have to provoke her?”

I shrug. It’s not like I meant to.

“Because,” I say, thinking of a good comeback. “We don’t give Benji Bikini enough respect for giving us an Emery-vacation.”

Mom hauls one last garbage bag outside. I open the lid, and she slams the bag into the trash can. That was the last of the pizza boxes. We’ve spent our entire morning hiding any trace of Spaceships Around Saturn in our house. Emery was far from pleased when Mom asked her to take down the A7 poster of Benji from her wall. There were too many “Dear Emery” messages handwritten on it. Emery is already counting down the hours until Thursday morning when the guys return so Benji can look down on her from her bedside once again.

I stand over the kitchen sink and scrub my hands with Mango Mandarin soap. Call me spoiled, but I really don’t remember the last time I helped take the garbage out.

“Days like this make me appreciate Godfrey,” I say to Mom.

She laughs. “Godfrey’s had a nice vacation with the guys here. Milo always helps out with stuff, so Godfrey has caught some slack.”

I think I’ve reached a new record. I hadn’t thought about Milo from the time I walked out to the trash can until now. That’s was what, two minutes? Maybe I can go for three minutes next time.

“He’s a really nice boy, don’t you think?” Mom asks.

Apparently she doesn’t want me to achieve three minutes. Oh screw it. I’m a lost cause for the next hour now that she’s got him on my mind.

I turn off the water and dry my hands, half-nodding to Mom because I don’t want to have this conversation.

“He asks a lot about you,” Mom says. “If you wanted to continue to have a…friendship with him once this lockdown is over, I wouldn’t mind, just for the record.”

Ugh. That pause before ‘friendship.’ She knows. She so totally knows.

“He’ll follow me on Twitter,” I say. “And that’ll be the most of it. They’re famous, Mom. We’ll just be a memory.”

She crosses her arms and leans back against the countertop. I busy myself with reading Benji’s updated note card Twitter feed on our fridge. Apparently he has taken a new liking to sweet tea, can’t wait to get more ink once lockdown is over, and swears on his life that he’ll update the real Twitter about his new BFF Emery as soon as he gets his phone back.

I pick up a pink card and debate what to ‘tweet’ back to Benji. I give this card every ounce of my attention, even though I see Mom still watching me in my peripheral vision.

“From what I gather,” she says. “You’re not ‘just a memory’ material. He said you were special.”

Mom has that voice, the sing-
songy voice that Emery used when she pointed out that Milo and I were both wearing white with a touch of black. Thank God it’s not the sad-baby-bird voice.

My heart thumps like it did the night they arrived, while I panicked on the couch and wondered how fast Emery’s heart was racing.
Play it cool, Chloe. Just play it cool.

“He said what?” I ask, doing my best to fake amusement or maybe even confusion.

“Welllll,” Mom drags out. “Noah said something about Aralie’s name, and I said that I’d wanted to name you something unique and special, but Scott wouldn’t let me. We made a deal that he could choose your name – Chloe – and I could name our next girl.”

Okay, Mom, get to the point. I know. Dad named me because he thought you were going through a hippie phase and making up names. You got pregnant shortly after I was born, threw the compromise in Dad’s face, and the name Aralie was born.

“And?” I prompt her.

“And Milo said that you were special, even without a creative name,” she says. “Then he added that he likes your name very much.”

I glance over the note cards on the fridge. There’s one to Benji from Milo. It’s some creeper line about watching him through the window. Sometimes I wonder just how well I know Milo Grayson after all. I uncap the pen on the counter.

“And?” I ask Mom again.

“That was it,” she said. “Noah cracked up at him, while drinking milk, and he spit it all over the floor. He ran out of the room laughing, and Milo apologized and offered to mop for me.”

“So wholesome,” I say, attempting sarcasm.

I write the words “creeper alert” on my pink note card, draw an arrow pointing upward, and stick it on the fridge under Milo’s window remark.

The doorbell rings. Mom ends all talk of Spaceships Around Saturn and clears her throat.

“There’s Paige,” she says. She sounds as enthused as I feel.

“What about Benji’s Twitter feed on the fridge?” I ask.

“I’ll mop,” Mom says. “Just keep her entertained and out of the kitchen.”

Mom waves me off to the front door. I know she’s supposed to be my best friend, but lately, I’d trade Paige for the tatted brunette who spits milk on our kitchen floor any day.

“She texted me after that and said that she saw him at the movies with Sydney, so I said to hell with him,” Paige rambles on. “I can do better, right?”

I nod along, just like I have for the last thirty-five minutes while she informed me of every detail of her dating hardships since summer began. What a waste of thirty-five minutes. I could’ve been watching Darby’s Daily Dose of Drama or silly YouTube clips of the guys. I could’ve been brushing up on my SAS trivia or even stalking Benji’s real Twitter feed for new gossip. I could’ve been helping Emery make a friendship bracelet for Jules. Since when did my life orbit around a Canadian boyband?

“Chloe?” Paige asks. “Are you even here? You seem like you’re light years away.”

Oh, you have no idea, Paige.

“Yeah, I’m here,” I say. “I was just listening. I didn’t want to interrupt.”

“It’s cool,” she says. “So, what’s been up with you?”

She makes herself comfortable by stretching out on my bed. She props up on an elbow, and I debate what I can say that might sound halfway believable. I can’t tell her what I’ve
really
been up to.

And that’s when her eyes widen and she sits up, looking around herself in a panic, like she’s lost her cell phone. She grabs Milo’s dark gray T-shirt that I may or may not have slept in last night. It still smells like him.

“Chloe, seriously? Whose is this? He smells delicious,” she says in one breath. “I can’t believe you have a guy in your life and didn’t tell me. That’s why you’re always busy and why it takes you three days to answer my texts. Spill it!”

I force myself to laugh before I spill a ton of lies onto my bed.

“It’s not what you think,” I tell her, even though it’s so what she thinks.

However, due to lockdown regulations, I’m not at liberty to tell her that, yes, there is a guy in my life. He’s famous and beautiful and talented. He has caramel eyes, a great sense of maturity about him, and recreates my favorite song acoustically. He’s sort of perfect, Paige.

“My mom’s friend’s son…” I say, making it up as I go. “He’s in summer school because he failed English, and Mom volunteered me to help him with his English paper.”

She stares at me, still holding onto Milo’s shirt. I want to rip it from her hands. Every second she touches it, she contaminates it. The scent of his body wash absorbs into her hands. I’m about to flip out Emery-style.

Paige looks at the shirt. “And he just took off his shirt in your room?”

“No,” I say, reaching for it. “He spilled his water bottle on it and acted like a diva, so Mom gave him one of Dad’s shirts to wear. He forgot it when he left. Mom can return it.”

I pry it away from her and toss it onto my pile of dirty clothes. She looks unimpressed.

“Chloe, I know a lot of crap happened between prom night and graduation,” she says in Mom’s Deacon-break up-voice. “And I understand that you might want to keep new guys a secret because of all the drama and gossip and stuff, but you could tell me. You know that, right?”

I spend the next thirty minutes reassuring her that, yes, I know I can talk to her about boy problems, and yes, I’d tell her if I had a new guy in my life. I’m stabbed with a slight sting of guilt because I know I’m lying through my teeth. From the look on her face, she knows I’m lying as well. As soon as lockdown is over, I’ll tell her everything – well, almost everything. Some of those Milo moments just feel worthy of being private memories.

Emery comes to my bedroom minutes after Paige leaves. I pause Darby’s Daily Dose of Drama to see what the little Saturnite has to say.

“I’m sorry I said you had to marry Milo,” she says. “He’s boring. You shouldn’t have to marry a boring person.”

“It’s okay,” I tell her. I don’t mind Milo and his ‘boring self.’ “I’m sorry I made you confess your Harry Styles secret.”

She shrugs. “Just don’t tell Benji.”

She rearranges the magnets on my file cabinet and sits through two episodes of Darby’s Daily Dose of Drama with me before she finally gets around to the real reason she came into my bedroom.

“I need your help,” she says. “I need to make a poster and some friendship bracelets. I already picked out the colors.”

After the wasted hours with Paige, I have no problem succumbing to the fandom of Spaceships Around Saturn. At least this will pass the time until Milo is back here with me.

Emery sits on the hardwood floor of the foyer with her giant poster. Mom will be sweeping up glitter for the next three years. Sparkles glint off of Emery’s face. The sign reads ‘Welcome Back! I missed you!’ I drew a heart with rings around it, like Saturn. It’s unbearably cute, and I’m secretly proud of my creativity. I’m sure Jules will laugh at it and make me feel like an idiot the second they return, so I enjoy the moment while it lasts.

The guys were supposed to be back three hours ago, but Dad said there was a delay in security, so they’ve been stuck at the cabin. I’m as anxious as Emery for them to return. Aralie has checked the time too often and has broken Emery’s record for asking Mom for updates. I think these two days have defeated Aralie too because last night, she danced around the kitchen singing lyrics to “Music Up, Windows Down” like only a Saturnite could do.

“Em, why don’t you go up to your room and play?” Mom asks. “I’ll holler for you when they get here. You’ll have plenty of time to get downstairs.”

“No,” Emery says. “I’m not moving.”

The little Saturnite remains a part of the foyer’s floor for the next hour while I entertain myself in my bedroom with YouTube videos of the guys.

The siren known as Emery goes off as soon as vehicles enter our driveway.

Aralie rushes into the hallway just as I do. Excitement swallows her face. It’s rare to see her smile like this. She’s not even trying to portray a badass exterior tonight.

“Act normal,” she says. “You know, like our ages and not Emery’s age.”

I nod in agreement and follow her down the stairs, as quickly yet as calmly as we can. The front door is already open when we get downstairs. Tate and Godfrey come inside first.

“Tater Tot!” Aralie yells, rushing over to him.

He drops his bags and hugs her, spinning her around in circles. Emery bounces next to them, all smiles even though she doesn’t give a flip about Tate Kingsley. She sings Benji’s name quietly and watches the front door, waving her poster all the while.

Noah waves to me as he ascends the steps into our house. Milo is behind him, deeply engaged in a conversation with Tank. The butterflies in my stomach dance around to their own little choreographed routine, one that they save just for Milo. I don’t even mind tonight.

Noah walks over to me with one arm outstretched.

“Did you completely die inside without us?” he asks, pulling me into a one-armed hug.

“I did,” Emery answers. “Chloe only did sometimes.”

Noah laughs. “I know where her mind was during those sometimes.”

I elbow him in the side and pull away as Milo walks toward us. Oh my God, I’ve missed his smile and his eyes and his whole freaking face. I never thought I’d be that girl who used the lame ‘I miss your face’ phrase, but I’m her – I’m that girl because I missed his face. Let the Saturnite corruption ensue.

“We survived,” Milo whispers to me.

It takes every droplet of strength in my body not to throw myself onto him and wrap myself around him. I want to hug him until my arms give out.

“You
wanna help me carry this stuff upstairs?” Milo asks, holding his guitar out toward me.

Hint or not, I totally catch on this time. My fingers tighten around the guitar strings, and they dig into my skin. I want to squeeze them tighter and tighter until there’s a permanent indention in my fingertips. That way, when this is all over, there’ll be a lockdown scar to remind me that this all really did happen.

Back in Milo’s room, he drops his bag onto the floor, and I carefully place his guitar on the bed. Then I spin around and am engulfed in his arms. If Earth fell from the Milky Way galaxy and was eaten by a black hole, it wouldn’t even matter right now. At least I’d have died happily in Milo Grayson’s arms. He cups my face in his hands and kisses my forehead.

Noah clears his throat from the doorway. Milo backs away from me with an electric-shock kind of force. I might as well have yelled, “Clear!” and pushed him in his chest.

“Dude,” he says to Noah. “Don’t scare me like that.”

“You’re the idiot who left the door open,” Noah says.

He strolls into the room and sits at the end of Milo’s bed. As much as I hate that he interrupted our moment, it’s probably better this way. Footsteps move up the staircase, and Tate laughs. Aralie is with him. Emery’s voice is faint, but she’s heading this way too. Benji must be two steps in front of her.

Milo reaches over for his guitar. He places it back against the wall.

“I wrote a song for every day we didn’t talk,” he says.

Noah falls back on the bed laughing. “Milo, really? That’s the lamest line I’ve ever heard.”

“No, seriously,” Milo says. “I wrote a song.”

“Exactly,” Noah says. “A song. As in
one song
. Because we left Tuesday and today is Thursday.”

Milo smiles. “And I wrote a song for Wednesday.”

“Loser,” Noah mumbles before he sticks his tongue out at Milo.

Our little triangle is interrupted by Benji and his shadow named Emery.

“Hey, Mr. Scott wants us all downstairs. He has an update on the case,” Benji says.

A sadness floods Emery’s eyes, and I wish I had a tissue to offer her. Benji looks hopeful, like he may not have to suffer the excitement of Emery much longer, but my spirit feels crushed. My butterflies don’t even dance with nervousness or fear. They just crumble inside of me.

All management teams, secret service agents, and bodyguards are gone once Dad assembles us into his game room. We spread out on the sectional – the Branson sisters, the Saturn guys, and Mom and Godfrey. It’s much less formal than Dad’s last big meeting with all of us.

Jules is wearing a black T-shirt with a white rocket ship on it. The words ‘My Rocket is Bigger Than Yours’ paint his chest. I think that may be worse than Benji’s SLUT shirt.

“I wanted to give you all an update as far as the case is concerned,” Dad says, pacing back and forth between us and his flat screen.

Milo doesn’t move at all next to me. I watch his chest for a second, just to make sure he’s breathing. Benji, on the other hand, can’t sit still. His legs bounce, and his knee knocks into mine every three seconds.

“There’s good news and bad news,” Dad says. “We have a very solid lead, and we’re in the process of following it right now. If this pans out, you guys should be free to go by the end of the week. But until then, lockdown remains.”

He waits for a moment, for someone to complain or interject or ask questions, but no one speaks. Not even Jules and his big rocket.

“So um, the bad news,” Dad continues, after realizing none of us are going to ask.

And then Jules speaks. “I thought ‘lockdown remains’ was the bad news.”

“For you, yes, that is the bad news,” Dad says. “If you guys want to go on upstairs and unpack, you can. The rest of this doesn’t affect you, but you can stay if you want. I just need my family to stick around for a minute longer.”

Benji is the first one on his feet, leaving a gap on the sectional between Emery and me. Noah follows him upstairs. Jules and Tate swap glances. I expect Jules to get up and follow his tatted brothers, but he remains. Milo doesn’t budge.

“Okay, well,” Dad says, in his dad-voice. “I hate to have to do this, but we’re not going to be able to go to the Up, Up, and Away Festival this year.”

“Dad!” Aralie shouts out. “That’s the only thing we ever do as a family. Aside from holidays or whatever. Mom has pictures of me as a newborn at the festival.”

I know the picture she’s referring to. It’s hanging on the wall in the hallway near Mom and Dad’s bedroom. I was a year old, wearing that awful red dress with ruffles that swallowed me. My eyes and mouth are wide open, and I look like the goofiest baby in the world. Aralie was just a few weeks old. It was before Mom had to color her hair and before Dad had circles under his eyes from working crazy-long hours.

“This isn’t fair,” Aralie says. “I’ve already bought my dress for it, and you know I never dress up for anything but Up, Up, and Away.”

“What is that?” Jules asks.

Aralie explains it as the annual hot air balloon festival that comes here every year. It’s usually just before the fourth of July, like a prequel of sorts to get the community together. There’s a huge hot air balloon show over the river, and you can see the balloons from basically anywhere in town. It’s absolutely gorgeous.

Mom stands up and walks over to Dad, discussing something with him in low voices so no one else can hear. Milo glances at me with sympathetic eyes.

“Okay,” Mom says. “How about this? You and Chloe can go, but Dad, Emery, and I will have to miss this year. But you’re right, it’s not fair to you girls that you have to miss something that we do every year just because of lockdown.”

Emery jumps into argumentative-mode, demanding that she deserves to see the hot air balloons up close too. Big teardrops s
tream down her splotchy cheeks as Mom tries to calm her down. Dad hands her a tissue, but she swats his hand away and continues to cry.

“We won’t go, Emery,” Aralie says, slumping on the couch.

Jules gives Aralie a one-armed hug, and she nods to whatever he says to her. Looks like someone grew a heart at the cabin. I never saw that coming.

Mom flashes
Aralie a thankful-proud-sympathetic smile…if there’s such a thing.

Emery snots into a handful of Kleenex. Her breath quivers as she inhales to speak.

“At least I will still have my birthday,” Emery announces.

Dad sits on the ottoman in the middle of the room and buries his face into his hands Benji-style.

“Yeah,” he says. “Um, about your birthday...”

It’s after midnight when I finally make it downstairs onto the back patio with Milo. He doesn’t say anything when I walk outside. He stands and walks to me, wraps me up in a hug, and we stand on the patio for minutes until I finally pull my head away from his chest to look at him.

“Hell of a night,” he says.

“No kidding,” I agree. “Let’s walk.”

We stroll through the grass toward the treehouse, and my brain replays the insanity of Emery’s postponed birthday party and Aralie’s eventual meltdown over missing the Up, Up, and Away Festival. On top of that, Mom informed me that Dad thinks very highly of the All-American Non-American boy as well.

Milo climbs up first and plugs in the lights. This has become so routine for us that he knows his way around the treehouse in the dark. I avoided even looking out here while he was gone because the reminder was too much. We’ll have to burn the treehouse down when lockdown ends. I can’t imagine being here without him.

Selfishly, I hope this lead doesn’t pan out. It’s awful of me to feel that way, I know, but I don’t want the guys to leave. This lockdown has become our normalcy. I don’t want to go back to silence. I want our house to be full of echoes of Xbox games, Aralie’s arguments with Jules, Benji’s shower songs, and Milo’s guitar. Can’t we just keep them forever?

Right now, Milo is my butterfly – wanting to bleed his ink to give the world some color. Yet he’s trapped under glass, being observed and maintained like a research specimen. All the while, I sit here telling him how beautiful his colors are and how the world needs to see them, but behind closed doors, I’m aiding and abetting the mad scientists who want him in a jar.

“Hey, you okay?” he asks.

I walk across the treehouse toward him, and we settle onto the small futon that serves as Emery’s couch. He wraps an arm around me and pulls me closer to him. Mmm, I’ve missed the scent of his body wash. Paige was right – he smells delicious.

“Talk to me,” he says. “What’s on your mind?”

Oh, you know, I just want you to stay here forever trapped under glass even though I’m fully aware that the world needs you to bleed for it.

“If you were a butterfly, what color would you bleed?” I ask.

He looks at me like I just asked him to pluck his eyeballs out. Then his face softens a bit.

“Blue,” he answers. “And you, Ms. Branson?”

I think about my own question for a moment. I don’t want to be typical and say my favorite color like he did.

“Orange,” I say.

He studies my face. “Why orange?”

I try to dream up some pretty line about the sunrise and how the pinks and oranges streak across the sky, but it’d sound prettier in a Sebastian’s Shadow song than from my mouth. So I tell him the truth.

“Because blue burns orange,” I say. “I figure no two colors could ever be closer than those igniting a flame.”

“Maybe you should be the one writing lyrics instead of me,” he says. “That’s deep.”

“Shut up,” I say, looking away at the fuzzy pink rug that Emery must’ve brought up here in the last two days.

“Hey, I was serious,” he says. He reaches for my cheek and turns me back to face him. “I’ll be the blue to your orange any day.”

I lean back against him, under the safety of his arm, and try to think of something to say that isn’t drenched in worry, sadness, and butterfly’s blood.