Kiss the Morning Star (7 page)

This is my worst nightmare. I hate girls like this, so flawless they must be unreal. I feel an arm slide around my waist and lean into Kat with a sigh of relief. She senses my vulnerability, helps hold me together in the face of this uncertain evening.

The sister turns toward us at last, smiling with her straight white teeth, the kind that glint too brightly to be natural. “You’re the refugees, huh? I’m Casey,” she says. She nods to her friend. “That’s Sammi, my best friend.” Her eyes slide over me from head to toe. “You’re hungry, huh?” I tug at the bottom of my shirt. My hand creeps up to touch the edge of the pink bandanna I’ve tied around my dirty hair. I feel pinned under the scrutiny of her gaze.

Kat grins, completely at ease. “We’re starving,” she says. “And what do people do around here for fun?”

Casey laughs, her voice that of a celebrity sex kitten being interviewed on late-night television. She and her plastic friend exchange a glance, a secret smile. “We can show you a thing or two.”

In some ways our journey begins in earnest on this night, the night of two lotus blossoms shimmering on the surface of the pond. The things that come before are important, of course. They are the roots in the mud, the two stalks that labor up to the light—delivering the blossoms to the dawn. The stems twine together; the roots curl and tangle in the depths. The twin blossoms turn as one, opening in tandem, following the sun each day to his fiery bed in the West.

“You’re driving, Sammi,” Casey says, in a tone that shows she is used to giving the orders.

Sammi snaps her gum, takes the keys, and climbs into the driver’s seat while Casey opens the passenger door and tips the front seat forward for us to climb in. Then she winks at me while Kat clambers over. “Your girl is hot,” she says, under her breath.

I scramble to respond, but I’m too slow. My face heats up—I try to hide it by climbing in quickly after Katy, wishing fervently that I could disappear, or at least come up with something casual and witty to say.

Is that what people think, then? A startling tingle travels through me at the thought. I lower my eyes, suddenly shy. Your girl is hot.
Your girl.
Do I have a girl? And okay, I’ll admit it isn’t like it’s the first time I’ve entertained the possibility, but hearing someone else say it—I sneak another glance at Kat, who leans toward the front seat, laughing at something that Casey or Sammi has said. I see her tiny over-bite, the small mole on her cheek, and I wonder. My girl? Am I…am I
into girls
?

My head spins. I remember the way she kissed me in the Shepherds’ guest bed. As a friend? She hasn’t ever kissed me like that before.

A smell. Sammi turns and laughs, smoke curling out of her mouth as she does. The smell, sweet and cloying, wrapping around me like the tendrils of a vine; I close my eyes for a moment. Clove cigarette. I fight against the memory.

My mother found it in my dresser drawer, tucked into a little wooden box that used to have tea bags in it.

“Why were you digging through my stuff?” My throat still hurts when I remember how I shouted, when I remember the shouting that came later that same night, through the smoke. Shouting for her.

That stupid, stupid night. I remember it in sound bites and images—my father’s voice as he stepped in to temper the heat of my mother, the flint in her eyes. Dad said they didn’t have any more kids because they liked the balance of our group of three, but I wonder how close we came sometimes to tearing him right down the middle. I remember the ache in my left heel from when I stomped upstairs to my room. The smell of the clove cigarette, clutched between my angry fingers. I smoked it to spite her, right there in my bed. I remember stabbing it out in the fichus plant, feeling dizzy. I remember putting it out. I’m sure of it. I’m positive. But that doesn’t erase the sense of guilt, as though it really were my cigarette—my act of stupid defiance—that set the whole night on fire.

Besides, I can find guilt anywhere. If she hadn’t been upset with me, maybe she wouldn’t have taken her pills. If she hadn’t taken them, maybe the smoke alarm would have been enough.
If…maybe.
If I believed enough in God, maybe he would have saved my mother.

I snap open my eyes and choke on the smoke that hangs heavily in the car. I roll down my window with a shaking hand. I hear nothing but the roar of blood in my ears, feel nothing but my heart.

Kat is looking at me. So is Casey, twisting around on her knees to peer over the back of the passenger seat. Kat looks concerned, Casey curious.

“Are you, like, going to throw up in my car?” The curiosity grows closer to disgust.

I force my eyes up to meet Casey’s. I shake my head, searching for the voice I left buried somewhere. “N-no,” I manage finally. “I’m okay.” My face is hot, my breath sucking in and out of my lungs noisily. I turn to Kat, fumbling for an explanation. “I—I couldn’t breathe all of a sudden. It was like, my heart…it won’t stop racing.” I can still feel it galloping in my chest, and I reach over—bridging the distance between us—I reach over for her hand and hold it tightly to my chest. “Feel.”

Kat nods, her eyes serious. She doesn’t seem at all fazed by the fact that her palm is pressed against my chest. “It’s really racing, Anna babe. I think you should lie down.” She scoots over a little and helps me recline, my head in her lap. I feel her fingers pressing into the pulse point in my neck. Her touch sends strange shivers through me. “It’s slowing down, babe. Just breathe.”

Casey is still peering over the seat at us. “You’re having a panic attack,” she says. “I get those all the time. Or at least, I used to. I don’t know why, but they stopped awhile ago.” She nods. “Lying down helps.”

How completely humiliating. I close my eyes. Kat’s fingers are soft against my eyelids, slowly moving in tiny circles, calming me even as they send waves of tingly confusion over me. I take a deep breath and try to picture my life with a girlfriend, with Katy. Suddenly my chest spasms, and I snap open my eyes, frightened again.

Kat giggles. “Hiccups, babe. You have the hiccups.”

Oh, wow. I start to giggle then, and so do the others, all of us laughing together. I roll halfway over and struggle to sit up, random hiccups escaping as high-pitched exclamation points interspersed with laughter. Stupid hiccups.

Casey spins around and faces forward again, turning up the music. Some pop diva whose name escapes me sings brightly about lust and sex, and for a while we all just sit and listen, a ripple of giggles running back and forth among us, punctuated by an occasional
hic.

When Casey turns around again, she holds out a joint and a lighter. “Either of you care to light this?” Kat reaches for it without hesitation, and I watch her set the tip on fire.

“Where are we going?” We’re driving along a rather dark highway. “In fact, where
are
we?” I take the joint, pressing it into my index finger like Katy shows me, but then I hold it, looking at her helplessly.

“Suck it straight into your lungs,” she says softly. I look into her dark eyes—the
interesting
eyes that challenged twelve-year-old me to take a dare. I think of her laughing with Sammi and Casey, the way they all seem to be having fun. I think of my daring so long ago, the way I surprised us both by kissing her. I’m tired of being the one who can’t have fun. I lift the joint to my lips.

The smoke fills my chest and then my head like a cloud, and I cough, gasp, choke. “Oh,” I say, when I get my breath back. I feel such a spiraling mess inside me.

“Oh,” I say again, barely a whisper. “I think I just did drugs.”

Kat laughs. “Anna, you’re adorable.”

I’m adorable? What does that mean? I cough. Casey takes the joint from me and holds it up to Sammi’s mouth. I’m worried about that, about her driving while stoned. I should say something, shouldn’t I? I’m supposed to, like, get out of the car right now and call my dad or something. But I don’t want to get out of the car. I don’t want to leave these plastic-perfect girls and their pop songs and this spiral, this tingly suggestion—this promise of excitement. I’m torn between fear and adventure—uncertain.

I try to pay attention to what Casey is saying.

“You didn’t think we were going to show you around
that
little dung heap of a town, did you?”

The joint makes its way back to me again. On the second round, my lungs feel less constricted as I inhale the heady smoke. I don’t hear any sirens, no officers of the law bent on throwing me in jail. No Hand of God interferes. My stomach growls.

I pass the joint up to Casey and lean back against the seat, watching the flicker of headlights as a car passes. “It got dark,” I say, my tongue loosened to the point of stating the obvious. I look to Kat, whose profile is shadowed against the fading glow from the window behind her. “I’m hungry.”

Sammi laughs, a little hint of cruelty in the ring of it. “Anna’s got the munchies.”

Even though I can’t really remember taking it, I seem to be holding the joint between my fingers once again. I suck in the smoke, feeling confident—an old pro at this. The roach is tiny, and little hot sparks scorch my lips, but I don’t even flinch.

All at once I’m giddy. Kat and I exchange a smile, and I see her relief—she’s glad I’m okay with this.

And I
am
okay with this—with this adventure. With more than that? I steal another glance at Katy and find that I’m glad to surprise her. I cough.

“You’re so messed up,” says Casey, and I reach over the seat to give her the roach, but I’m clumsy, and I drop it somewhere.

“You idiot!” Casey scrambles in the dark.

All my confidence vanishes. I feel tears spring to my eyes.

“These seats are
leather!”

Sammi turns on the dome light, flooding the car with a surreal illumination. “
Shut that fucking light off!”

Sammi snaps the light off, and Casey triumphantly holds up the roach, which is still lit.

“I—I’m sorry.” I don’t know what to say. “Did it burn the seat?”

Casey grins over the seat back. “Oh, I don’t know,” she says, sucking hard on the roach. “Whatever. I don’t care.” She laughs. “Besides, it’s
so obvious
you’re a complete amateur. I don’t know why I even gave it to you when it was that small.”

I watch as she holds the roach to Sammi’s lips, trying not to think words like
tragic
and
head-on collision.
I hate this unfortunate habit I have of imagining grim newspaper headlines about my own life.

I squeeze my eyes shut.
This is the kind of situation where I used to pray.
Instead, I take a deep breath and lace my fingers into Katy’s, trusting the darkness to cover the hot blush that accompanies my daring.

Casper isn’t huge, but it has that smugness of being the biggest thing for miles around, and the lights of it are enough to blow my mind as we drive in. I’ve been sitting there in the dark car, quietly stoned out of my mind, and when I see the glow of the lights, and the distant shadows of the Casper Mountains looming in the background, I gasp. All of it seems to shimmer, to expand and contract.

I pull away. “Katy,” I say. “You know that part you were reading in
The Dharma Bums
, about that lady, Rosie, the one who was trying to kill herself?”

Kat nods, serious.

“And he told her to relax, that she
was
God?”

“I remember.”

We are pulling into downtown. “And then when she dies, when she jumps off that roof, and the cop grabs her robe, but she falls naked like a newborn down to the ground, and then Kerouac realizes that Heaven is everywhere all the time, and all religions are one, and we are all a part of God?”

Kat squeezes my hand to let me know she hears.

“That was cool, wasn’t it?”

“You’re stoned, Anna,” Kat says softly, and I’m about to protest, but her mouth collides with mine, and then she’s kissing me. For a crazy instant I feel like our mouths are actually two parts of the same person—two perfect halves of some divine whole, a fruit full and ripe, waiting to be consumed—and then I laugh, a ridiculous giggle. She’s right. I’m so stoned.

I’m also starving. “Someone please tell me there’s a pizza shop in this town that’s open late and isn’t a hangout for bored cops.”

The others immediately agree, and Casey directs us to a tiny hole-in-the-wall with a bunch of teenage boys in the kitchen and a handful of narrow booths in the front. The place is deserted, and the lighting is dim. Kat and Sammi order pizzas while Casey and I drop some quarters into the dusty pinball machine. I’m starting to feel more normal. I have what feels like a perfectly dignified conversation with the counter girl when I go up to buy a soda out of the cooler, and I get a decent score at pinball as well.

“I want more quarters,” Casey says. She drags me by my elbow back up to the counter, and I can’t be entirely sure, but this time it seems like the girl stares at us.

“Quarters, please.” I giggle a little as I hand over the money.

The girl just raises her eyebrows and hands me a stack of eight quarters. “You’re having an interesting night, huh?” she says.

Casey leans into me, wrapping her arm around my neck. “Anna’s
my
girlfriend now,” she says to the counter girl. “We’re going to run away to Mozambique.” She leans over and licks my earlobe.

I pull away, my hand flying up to my ear. “What are you doing? Gross!”

Casey laughs. “Do you even know what that is?”

“What, Mozambique?”

“Eargasm!” Casey giggles.

The girl at the counter laughs.

I cover my ear and laugh, too, feeling lighter than I have in a long, long time.

“So what should we do now?” I pick at the edge of my last slice of pizza. I’m too full to eat it, but it tastes so good I almost can’t stop myself from trying. It has to be past midnight, and even after our second round of energy drinks, I’m wilting. I wonder about sleep, about what comes next. My chest tightens.

“Yeah, we should
do
something,” Kat says, her voice dreamy. Her head is on my shoulder.

“Like what?” My brain is empty, my stomach so full it feels like I’ve swallowed a washtub full of wet denim.

She sits up straight and opens her eyes. “I know!” she says. “Let’s get matching tattoos!”