Unlit Star (21 page)

His fingers tip my chin back so that I have nowhere to look but into his eyes. He smiles tenderly, looking like a damaged angel under the radiance of a nearby streetlamp. "Who are you to judge beauty based on how you view yourself? We all look at ourselves and see our flaws. Look at me. I have scars I cannot hide, scars I think make me ugly. Do
you
think I'm ugly?"

"No," I whisper, my voice like a caress of air.

The back of his hand slides down my cheek, and my breathing turns quicker while my insides warm. "Your eyes are like honey, your lips like the soft petals of a red rose, and your cheekbones are sharply designed to accentuate your unique features."

"Unique?" I repeat, my voice higher than I would like.

Half of his mouth lifts. "Yeah. Sure, you're not classically good-looking, but you have your own form of beauty. It's your light, your heart. You
glow
."

"Rivers," I begin raggedly, my heart thundering inside me like a million drumsticks beating against a drum.

"Yes?"

"Stop or I'll be forced to write you a sonnet. For real."

Quiet laughter floats over me as he takes my hand in his. We begin to walk. "Don't pretend you haven't already started it. It probably begins with you rescinding your love of peanut butter for me."

"Don't push it."

THE SUN WARMS MY BACK with its blanket of fiery heat as I swim laps in the pool. I have learned recently to take joy in the smallest of things—like the sun shining, the rain, the wind, the colors all around us. I never paid enough attention before. Now every intricate detail is important to me.

Fingers dance along my spine and cause a tingling where they meet my flesh. I jerk away and up, finding Rivers standing beside me.

“Hey. You surprised me.” I splash water at him, grinning when I get him directly in the face.

He wipes an arm across his face and my eyes are drawn to the muscled length of his arms and down to his chest. “Why do you splash water at me when I'm already wet? Doesn't that defeat the purpose?”

“Oh, Wise One, thank you for pointing that out to me.”

He squints through the sunshine at me, water dripping down his face and chest like glistening teardrops. “Your back says Neil.”

I blink, it taking a moment to make the connection between where he touched me in reference to his words. There is a black four-lettered word tattooed down my spine that I got on my eighteenth birthday, along with the nose piercing. It was my tribute to a little boy—my way of saying I will not forget him, not ever. Well, the tattoo was. The piercing was all for me.

“It does, yes.”

“Who's Neil? Was that your brother?”

I swallow and look down, trailing my fingers back and forth through the clear water. “Yes."

"I didn't know his name." He nudges my chin and I look up. Rivers smiles sweetly, his eyes warm.“I bet he thought you were pretty cool, didn't he?”

“Actually, he found me to be quite annoying.” I laugh softly, remembering how I used to follow Neil around everywhere, much to his chagrin. He couldn't even go to the bathroom without me on the other side of the door trying to talk to him.

“If he could see you now—he'd know the depth of your coolness.”

“Maybe. Or maybe I'd still be just really annoying.”

“Tell me about him.”

I take a deep breath, the warm water swaying around me, and I sway in return. Or maybe my legs are wobbly from thinking about my older brother I have missed for twelve years. He would be twenty now, probably in college, in love with some girl and partying it up with his friends. I could see him as a version of Rivers in some ways—he loved sports so much he would have had to be good at them. My older brother that I have surpassed in age, making me the older sibling. It's weird how once someone dies, they are forever frozen at the age they left this life. Everyone around them continues to grow older, but not them. They are forever preserved. It is an abnormality that shouldn't be. In my estimation, we should all have long, well-used lives; not half-lives, or quarter lives.

We all need our chance at life.

“He was on a jungle gym—”

“No,” he interrupts. “I don't want to know about that. I was there that day. I remember. I want to know about
him
.”

Rivers just gave me a gift without even knowing it. I feel my heart expand and fill as I gaze at him. No one asks me to talk about him, not even my mother—
especially
not my mother. The death of Neil is this big wall between us, unbreakable because we let it be. And here Rivers stands, asking me to scale it for him. I press my lips to his, tasting water, feeling the warmth of his life through his lips.

And I talk about my brother.

The sun goes higher in the sky as we do back floats, and I tell him about Neil trying to teach me about sports. He loved watching football, baseball, and basketball. He tried to explain the logistics of the games to me, but I was too young to understand.
He
should have been too young to know what he was talking about, but he seemed to understand the plays. I still don't understand sports.

I reapply sunscreen as I tell him how one summer Neil went an entire two months wearing the same shirt. He would let my mom wash it two times a week, but that was the longest he'd agree to go without it. She had to eventually wrestle it from him when he announced he was going to wear it to school too. The shirt magically disappeared that night. Neil cried. It was a Spider-Man shirt and he thought as long as he wore it, he had spidey senses. I cried with him, thinking my mom had stolen his powers away.

Rivers watches me—not speaking, just listening. I tell him how my brother would play zombies with me and I always had to be the zombie. I got shot a lot with an imaginary gun. One day I squirted ketchup all over the front of a new dress to be a more effective zombie. Neil thought it was real blood and went screaming to our mom. She was not happy, mostly because she'd just gotten the dress and we were supposed to get family photographs taken that day. She rescheduled. He laughs, sweeping hair from my face as we make make a light lunch of roast beef sandwiches and fruit salad.

We eat on the deck under the shade of the umbrella. He steals my grapes and I take his banana slices. And still I talk of my brother, never tiring, never running out of words. I needed this. Rivers somehow knew I needed this. The sky has turned from blue and cloudy to streaks of pinks, purples, and oranges by the time I finally go quiet. I am exhausted, and not just my body, but my mind. I am also empty of some of the sorrow I normally carry around. I feel cleansed, relieved—not fully, but enough. I exhale slowly, turning my head to find his eyes still on me. In fact, I don't think they strayed far from me all day.

“I've been thinking.” he tells me.

“Oh?”

“I've been thinking a lot, actually.” The intensity of his gaze is startling. “There are so many people out there, so many lives unknown because of stereotypes, or because someone doesn't fit in with the majority the way they are expected to. There are so many chances to know amazing people thrown away without people even realizing it.”

I pick at my yellow nail polish. “You just now realized this?”

“Yeah. I guess I'm a little slow. I was always seeing life in one way when I should have been seeing it in another. Apparently getting injured turned out being a good thing for me. Who knew, right?”

A warm breeze caresses my face like a kiss from a loved one and I smile as I close my eyes. He is finally getting it. I lie back on the soft blanket we procured from inside. It's so serene here with the sun setting and our enclosed area behind the fence. I think I could lie here forever and be at peace.

“You're evolving. Be proud.”

“You make me sound like a caveman.”

“Well...”

“Funny.” He lets out a deep sigh. “Anyway, I think...I think I know what I want to do.”

“What's what?” I whisper.

He shifts beside me, lying down with his arm touching mine. “I want to be more like you.”

I laugh. “No you don't.”

“I do. Teach me how.”

I open my eyes and turn my face to look at him. Rivers is grinning. I push at his shoulder. “Well, let's focus on presentation first. You'll have to get your nose pierced. I mean, that's a given.”

He purses his lips, nodding.

“And dye your hair random colors. I would go with pink to start off, personally.”

“Did you ever dye your hair pink?” he asks dubiously.

I give him a look.

Sighing, he closes his eyes, looking pained. “What else? Tell me. I can take it.”

“You'll have to hang out with me on a daily basis so my goodness rubs off on you.”

“Goodness?” I elbow him. “Okay, okay. I think I can do that.”

I make my voice stern as I tell him, “It's a deal breaker. Either you can handle my awesomeness or you can't. And if you can't, you have no right trying to be as almighty as me. Got it?”

His eyes pop open. “Okay. But do I have to wear the green bikini? Because I don't want to outshine you in all your pale glory.”

Laughing, I squint my eyes at him even though the sun has all but gone under the horizon. “We'll negotiate that later.” I close my eyes again, going still as his arm slides beneath my head. I am tugged closer to him, his heat seeping into my side, his scent assaulting my senses. The word
perfect
comes to mind.

“We should sleep out here.”

“We could,” he says. “But what about the bugs?”

“We can spray so much bug spray on us the fumes alone will kill them from a mile away.”

“
Or
...we could put a tent up and sleep in it.”

I go up to my elbows and look down at him. “Really?”

Rivers laughs as he sits up. “Yeah. You act like you've never slept in a tent before.”

“I haven't,” I confess.

It's his turn to look shocked. “
Everyone
sleeps in a tent at least once in their childhood.”

I point at myself and shake my head.

“I don't know what to say,” he says with a mournful expression on his face that is totally fake. “We need to fix this. Stat.”

“Do you have a tent?”

“Of course. It's in the garage. Come on.” He stretches his hand out to me and I take it.

“Do you guys do a lot of camping?” I ask as we go through the house and into the garage.

“We did, yeah.” He rummages through a stack of boxes, totes, and bags in a far corner of the room. “We did a lot of outdoors stuff when I was younger—camping, hiking, fishing, hunting. We still do once in a while, just...it isn't the same. It is more like an obligation now than a tradition. Here it is!” He pulls a dark green rectangular cloth bag from the pile, his expression close to gleeful as he holds it in the air.

I think I am not the only one reconnecting with a childhood missed as we struggle to get the dome-shaped contraption into a standing position in the backyard. We tease each other as we work, and when I trip over a stake and land face first in the half-constructed tent, Rivers just laughs as he pulls me to my feet. The tent is caved in, so we start over, but it is of no consequence. It is full dark out by the time we finish. We grab blankets and pillows from his bed and the spare bedroom, throwing them in a disorderly pile in the center of the tent. Then we look at each other.

I grin, he grins, and we start laughing. I am not even entirely sure why, but it feels good. It is like reaching into the past has swathed us in giddiness, and made us in this moment simpler, but happier. We put a tent together. And it made us smile.

“You have dirt smeared across your nose,” he tells me.

“And you have grass in your hair.”

I reach for him as he reaches for me and we collide, which makes me laugh even harder. I tip my head back and let it leave me in a cascade of mirth. When I look at him again, he is staring at me in a way that makes me think he feels like if he doesn't memorize every single detail of my face, he will miss something he will later regret. I go still, wondering what he is thinking as he looks at me.

“Hey there, Delilah,” he says softly, a slow smirk taking over his features.

“Don't even,” I warn. I can tell what he is thinking of doing just by how he said that.

He does.

He sings 'Hey There Delilah' by The Plain White T's. Night holds us in its embrace, but he lights it up with his essence alone. His voice is steady, deep, and touches me in a way I cannot explain. This feeling I have for him, it has washed away anything that has fought to darken my heart and soul. I feel reborn in what he gives me with his mere presence. Before he even finishes the song, I am springing myself at him, wrapping my arms around his neck and squeezing him to me.
Don't let go, don't let go
, I think. I don't know who I am telling that to—him or me. I guess both of us.

“Girls always fall for that,” he says close to my ear.

“How many Delilahs have you sung that to?” I ask, never relinquishing my hold on him. It is always hard for me to pull away from him.