Catch a Falling Star (31 page)

her cool eyes. “I know.”

I glanced between the two of them. “Do you guys ever think

about all of this just ending?”

“Like the end of the world?” Chloe’s eyes widened.

“No, like the end of
our
world.”

They each wound an arm around me and squeezed, a friend

sandwich. They didn’t have to say it for me to know the answer.

Across the street, a man leveled his camera at us from a parked

car the color of sand. He took a few shots and then pulled away.

Chloe clapped her hands together. “Oh, do you think that will

be in
People
? Will I get to be the friend whose shoulder you cry on?”

She stood, trying to catch sight of the beige sedan before it turned

the corner.

I tugged at the back of her shirt. “You’re always that friend,

dummy.”

Turning, she smiled sweetly. “I know . . . but this time it

might be in
People
.”

I caught Alien Drake’s eye. “Slow learning curve, that one.”

He pulled Chloe onto his lap.

An hour later, I was sitting cross-legged on my bed with Extra

Pickles when someone tapped on my door. “Come in.”

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Dad poked his head in the room. He held a small white box in

his hand tied with a gold bow. “Hey, this came for you. Today was

the big fight, right?”

“Yeah.” I patted Extra Pickles’s head. The box was from

Morning Glory, my favorite bakery. Dad brought it to me on the

bed, and I opened it. Nestled inside was a single, perfect vanilla

cupcake with pink icing and star sprinkles. There was no note.

“From Adam?” Dad settled on the cedar chest where I kept

things like yearbooks, old dance programs, a shoe box of elemen-

tary school pictures.

I shrugged. “Probably Parker.”

Dad scanned my walls. “I haven’t sat in here in a while. You

still loving this green?”

When I was ten, I’d begged my parents to paint my room

Kermit green with white trim. I had been obsessed with the

Muppets, the old ones from the seventies, and I wanted my room

to match Kermit, my favorite character.

“I’m still digging the Kermit.”

Dad smiled. “He’s a classic.”

We both noticed the awkward pause. Dad wasn’t much for

small talk, and he was being sort of fidgety, clearly trying to work

up the nerve to say something to me. “What’s up, Dad?”

He gave me a steady look, his eyes searching my face. “Why

aren’t you dancing anymore?”

“Did Mom put you up to this?” I set the cupcake box on my

side table.

“No!” He flushed. “Okay, yes. We’ve been having a lot of talks

about you lately.”

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I pulled my ivory pillow onto my lap like a shield. “So it seems.

What does Mom think?”

“That you freaked out.”

I narrowed my eyes at him. “I didn’t freak out.”

“Sure you did. It’s okay, Carter. People freak out. It’s not

always a bad thing. Sometimes it’s a response that reminds you that

you’re alive with choices. You were handed this huge thing, this

massive piece of praise, and you freaked out. It’s okay.”

“It never happened to you. You went from high school to Little

Eats. Point A to Point B. Simple.”

He licked his lips. “Is that what you think I did?”

“Didn’t you?”

“Actually, I tried pretty hard to do the musician thing for a few

years before I came back to Little.” He explained he’d been with a

band that had bopped around Northern California, getting gigs

here and there, hoping to be picked up by a label. “But it didn’t

happen, and we landed in Santa Cruz, where I met your mom.”

My stomach hurt. “Why haven’t you ever told me?”

“You never asked.”

“I’m not asking now and you’re telling me.”

He sighed, his face freckled with the light coming in through

the blinds. “You might be an old soul, Carter, but you’re still

seventeen.”

My stomach churned, and the air-conditioning in our house

felt wrong, too cold, too dry. “You think I should have taken that

scholarship.” Extra Pickles stared up at me with big eyes, whining

at the increased pitch of my voice.

“I don’t, actually.” Dad fiddled with a stack of my laundry I

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hadn’t yet put away. “Personally, I don’t think you would like New

York, which is why I didn’t say anything at the time. I don’t think

you need to want New York or all it stands for. But I think you

made a mistake just stopping.”

“What do you mean?”

“You don’t have to go to New York or college or wherever to

be a dancer. I played in a lot of cool venues. It was great, until it

wasn’t, and then I came home, and I have the café now and I love

it. That was my journey. That was my choice. But you just stopped.

All those years of love just ceased to be. And I think that was a

mistake.” He folded and unfolded a sweatshirt that kept falling off

the stack. “Mom and I both think that.”

I leaned into the wall behind my bed, the light changing the

room, shifting to evening. “But you didn’t say anything before.”

“We weren’t sure you were ready to hear it.”

I thought back to the day I told the school no, the sound of

dead air on the other end of the phone. “Other people wanted

me to go.”

He laughed, a funny short breath of air. “This isn’t about
other

people. This is about you.” Leaning forward, his wide shoulders

shifting, he said, “Carter, I love how much you help other people.

You’re so much like your mom. But what you don’t get is that you

have to work out your own self first. You have to decide what

you want from your own life. Then you have to be accountable to

it. And just so you know, people criticized me for throwing in the

towel too early. My former bandmates never spoke to me again,

and I spent some years feeling like a failure.”

“You did?
You?
”

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“Listen to me, Carter, because you know me and I don’t like to

give speeches. That’s been hard with John, and I’ve never really

had to with you, but I’m going to try one, okay?”

“Okay.” Touched by how hard this was for him, I sat up a

little.

He cleared his throat. “Here’s the thing you need to know.

Here’s a hint from Grown-up World. There’s no right way. Not

really. Just perspective. We
choose
whether we succeed or fail.
We

do. It’s all our own spin on it. We create our own definition of

success or failure. You can’t hold yourself up to other people’s ver-

sions of things. Not society’s idea of things, and not other people’s.

Your own. But regret . . . well, that’s a real thing. Take it from

me. You should try things on, see if they fit you. If they don’t, it’s

not failure. It’s a choice. But always let yourself have a choice, let

yourself have possibilities. People say, ‘Follow your dreams, blah

blah blah,’ but no one’s checking up on that, no one’s out there

with a clipboard saying, ‘Yes, Carter Moon. Dream followed!’

You’re accountable to yourself. So if you don’t ever take the

chances, if you don’t ever at least try, you’re going to be sitting in

that café when you’re forty wondering about them.”

“You don’t know that for sure.” My voice wavered.

“Sure I do. Why do you think I started Glory Daze? There’s no

irony lost in that name. Besides, you’re already wondering or you

wouldn’t still be teaching that Snow Ridge class, you wouldn’t be

finding a way to keep it in your life.”

“I like that class because it’s just fun. It’s not about me.” Even

as I said it, though, I knew that it was about me. I could tell myself

it was about the old people there, and somehow it seemed less

250

selfish of a pursuit if it was about helping them, but I kept doing it

because they asked me to “do a dance” each week without wanting

anything from it, without suggesting that it be some sort of future

goal. “I just don’t want to be selfish. Mom’s always saying how I

was already born on third base, so I shouldn’t act like I’ve hit a

triple.”

Dad laughed then, familiar with one of Mom’s favorite expres-

sions. “You have never been an entitled kid, Carter. Even when you

were nine, you donated all your birthday money to a wildlife foun-

dation.” He leaned back against the wall, studying me, his eyes

glossy. “We think it’s great, but Mom and I never meant to teach

you to give up yourself entirely. That’s not what we meant at all.

It’s not selfish to love something, to put something beautiful out in

the world. If you can keep it about that, and not turn it into a

bunch of narcissistic mega-crap, well, that’s its own sort of ser-

vice. You’ve got to figure out what makes the world beautiful for

you, so you can help make it beautiful for other people.”

Around me, my room breathed with its familiar sounds,

Extra Pickles’s breathing, the slow spin of the ceiling fan. “I just

like it here.”

Dad stood. “Honey, you’re one of those lucky people who will

like a lot of places. And you will always have
here
.” He bent to kiss

my head, and Extra Pickles followed him out of the room, leaving

me alone.

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yesterday’s sightings

Things Are Looking Up in Little, CA

Morning, sky watchers. Last night, we sat on the roof

and thought about constel ations. Constel ations are these

patterns that human beings stitched into the sky starting, like,

4,000 years ago (probably longer) to make sense of it, to be

able to point at a group of stars and say, That’s Orion, or

That’s the Big Dipper. But they are just groupings of stars. They

exist only because humans invented them, made them up to

create order out of the crazy, wide sky, a sky that would exist

without humans ever naming it. It’s a human need — that

order — because it gives us a sense that we have control. But

we don’t. Not real y. At any point, you could make up your

own patterns — point out three or four stars and call them the

Donut. As long as you know what star you’re looking at,

the patterns already there don’t necessarily matter at al .

It got us thinking about all the patterns in our own lives

that we assume we must fol ow — graduation, col ege, work,

marriage. Who stitched those patterns together and decided

they were the only way to look at life?

We were just wondering.

See you tonight, under the sky.

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twenty

i worked the next couple of days at the café. Adam’s shooting

schedule was insane, and Parker thought it would make our fight

more believable if we didn’t have much contact. I tried to lose

myself in the busy buzz of the café, tried to let the rhythm of

the summer crowd clear him from my mind, but every time the

door pushed open, I found myself wishing he would be coming

through it.

After work, I walked home. Evening fell in Little in that sum-

mer sort of way, where the sky melts into sherbet colors at the

horizon over the pines, and the air starts to carry small pricks of

cool mountain nights within its heat. This was my favorite time

of day in the summer, that easy melting. It loosened the knots of

my busy mind.

No one was home, so I poured a glass of iced tea, grabbed the

box of frozen Junior Mints I’d been saving, and crawled into

the childhood space of my tree house to watch the sun set

through the wide window.

My parents wanted a list of my options — something that

would help grow me outside of Little. But I only seemed to want

to watch Little melt into nighttime. I wasn’t sure I wanted more

253

than this — the sweet glow of twilight, nothing beyond the way

the ease of it seeped under my skin, the way the frozen Junior

Mints tasted in my mouth.

Somehow, that made me wrong. I should want more than

Junior Mints on a summer evening.

I read once somewhere that dancers must have passion, talent,

and ambition to succeed in the professional world. A trifecta of

skills. For years, I’d confused ambition with hard work, with that

energetic pulse that pushed me to class each day, that made me ice

my aching muscles and get back up again to dance. Hard work.

Dancing was hard work. But hard work was not ambition.

Ambition was something else.

And I didn’t have it.

Adam had it. It drove him to endure the crowds, the tabloids,

the constant stream of attention, both bad and good. It buoyed

him. Beckett Ray had it — it sent her head spinning with big-city

dreams.

But not Country Mouse me.

Why didn’t I seem to want more than this town?

I popped another mint into my mouth, staring out at the

gloaming, thinking about the day I turned down that scholarship

last summer. Would I ever regret not choosing New York? I didn’t

think I would, but Dad wasn’t talking about New York. He was

talking about dancing, the simple act of it. Not what I could parlay