Starbird Murphy and the World Outside (31 page)

“You didn't say good-bye,” he said.

“Yeah, I just . . . went.” My tongue tied itself like a cherry stem. Indus was so close to me. The sleeves of his T-shirt stretched tight over his muscular arms.

“Lyra's right,” he said. “You do look more grown-up.”

I realized I was still wearing my café apron over the navy dress. I wished I had taken it off. I shivered.

We got to the place where rough alley met smooth road and saw the Farm truck parked on the street. Indus sat down on the rusty chrome fender. My heart was a mess of butterflies and net, fluttering and getting tangled in itself. I stood in front of him.

“You remember when Doug and I got our apprenticeships? That was your first Translation, right?”

“I was ten.” I nodded.

“You were so cute, Doug's little sister,” he said. “Those pink flowers in your hair.”

“You remember my flowers?”

“I remember everything about that day.” Indus's hair was shaggy and badly in need of a trim. I wished I had been there to cut it for him.

“Were you jealous when Doug got EARTH as a mentor?” I said.

“Are you joking? I was learning to fix tractors while Doug was stuck inside doing math. I felt bad for him.” Indus put his hands on his legs and looked at his boots.

“You wouldn't have wanted to be EARTH's apprentice?”

“I'll put it this way. We've kept the Farm running for three years without EARTH. How long do you think we would have made it without Iron?”

I had never thought about it like that. “I've got Iron's last name now. It's Murphy,” I said, folding my arms against the chilly air.

“No shit,” Indus said. “Is he your dad?”

I kicked the truck's tire with my boot. “No one knows.”

Indus studied my face like a painting. “I could see it. You remind me of him.”

“It might be EARTH, though,” I said. “It's possible.”

Indus turned his head and didn't say anything for a minute. “I felt like it was my fault you left the Farm. That night you saw me with Lyra—”

“I shouldn't have walked in. It was my fault. We're not into ownership. Now that I've lived in Seattle, I get it.” I was talking too fast, interrupting him. A panic was creeping up alongside desire.

“I don't think it's ownership to want to be with one person,” he said. “To
want
to be faithful.”

“I don't either,” I said.

“I was pretty upset the night I kissed you. I couldn't stop thinking about what my mom told me, how my dad left because she slept with EARTH. And you were being so sweet and listening to me.” Indus took both of my hands in his hands. His eyes were blue, not like Ben's puddle eyes. Indus's eyes were clear water in a pool at the bottom of a waterfall on a hot day when you've been hiking for hours. “Starbird, we've been so close my whole life.” He rocked my hands back and forth with his and looked at my fingernails. “I want to be the kind of guy who picks one person. Who's devoted. I'm with Lyra. She's my girlfriend.”

The truck might as well have come out of park, started moving, and rolled right over me. He wasn't trying to kiss me. He was squeezing the juice from my heart.

“I was wrong to kiss you. I'm too old for you. I should have been looking out for you like a little sister.” He squeezed my hands. My heart butterflies were all caught and pinned to the wall.

I looked down and let my braid swing in front of my face. The tears tried to take control of my eyes again.

“You're so pretty and special and important to me.” Indus reached one hand up to move my hair out of the way. Then he said, “Oh hey, man.”

My head snapped up. I looked at Indus, whose eyes were looking at the alley. Standing on the sidewalk just beside the truck and staring at us from under his dark hair was Ben.

“Fern said you were here, and I wanted to tell you the total money you made, but I didn't mean to interrupt you. She said I should go while Rory watches the cash box, but I thought you were alone.” He held a piece of paper out to me. It was his handwriting and had a dollar amount written in block numbers and a note that said,
Enough for all the big bills
. Then there was a drawing of a bird with a dollar bill in her mouth, perched on top of a pyramid like the one on the back of the money.

Indus stood up. “I'm going back—”

“I gotta go home,” Ben interrupted him, and started walking backward down the sidewalk in the direction of his house. “I told my mom I would be home for dinner and she's making chicken and she said the chicken gets dry if you try to keep it warm, but Rory knows how to handle the cash box. Spam it, I wish I didn't have to leave, but I do.”

“Wait—” I said, taking three footsteps after him.

“Sorry.” He turned and ran a few feet, leaving me standing next to Indus, who tenderly took my hand and walked me back to the café.

 
 

“To Starbird!” Glasses clinked as cider was raised in all directions. It was nine o'clock and the farm stand was packed up, the cider press cleaned and loaded on the truck, and the restaurant closed for the day. Rory was surprised when I told her Ben had left, so she took out her phone and started texting. She left pretty soon after that. I didn't ask her if she was going to see him.

Everyone else had gathered in the restaurant's main room, all the visitors from the Farm and Bellingham and Family members from Seattle. Even Felicia stood behind the cash register, biting at her fingernails, and Sun and Cham stood behind the counter with their aprons still on.

“We should have enough for every person to take one gallon home,” announced V, “and we doubled the best day we ever had at the restaurant.” Applause broke out, along with many congratulations. Fern Moon kissed me on the cheek and Devin hugged me. Other members patted my shoulder or clinked their cups against mine. Lyra Hay wrapped Indus's arm around her shoulder and nuzzled into his chest.

“Say something, Starbird!” Paul yelled above the chatter.

“Yeah, a speech before we all go home,” Adam said.

The room quieted and all eyes focused on me. I cleared my throat. “I'm more tired than I've ever been in my life,” I started. People laughed and agreed, raised their glasses again. “And I wish Ephraim could be here.” There were many sounds of agreement and more glasses clinking. “Thank you for everything you did. I always wanted to do something important for the Family, I always wanted—”

“I just got off the phone.” Eve burst in through the beaded curtain from the direction of the office and cut into my speech. Heads turned toward her. “EARTH is coming back.”

 27 

L
ike the moon moving in front of the sun, whatever moment of congratulations I might have enjoyed was eclipsed. A roar went up in the café that Ephraim could have heard all the way at Harborview. People were hugging one another, so cider was sloshing onto the floor, sleeves, and shoes.

“Perfect timing,” Adam said to a guy from Bellingham, giving him a high five.

“It's a sign. We had to be successful on our own for him to return,” Saturn Salt proclaimed, putting a hand over her heart. One of the Canadian Family members started crying.

“It's so fortuitous,” Adeona said to Caelum, “EARTH has made all this possible.”

EARTH was the name falling off of every tongue, when just seconds before it had been my name.

“Do you think EARTH will get here in time for Story Night?” Europa was saying to V, who crossed her arms over her chest and did not smile.

Most of the Family members were talking excitedly and making plans. But Sun took off his apron and threw it on the floor behind the counter before slamming through the swinging door to the dish room. Felicia took her purse from behind the register and walked out the front door. I caught sight of Paul and Devin heading through the beaded curtain toward the office. And I stood in the middle of all of it wondering why I didn't feel happy that EARTH was finally coming home.

 
 

Indus and I said good-bye while Lyra stretched out in the passenger seat of the truck. When she said good-bye to me, she added, “I was so much wilder than you when I was sixteen. No way could I have been this . . . organized.” She didn't make it sound like a compliment.

“I'm proud of you.” Indus hugged me. Then he handed me a piece of paper from his back pocket. “I found this by the cash box when I was cleaning up the farm table. Looked like it was for you.” He jumped in the truck with the cider press and drove off, Lyra Hay's bare feet dangling out the passenger window.

I unfolded the paper and found another one of Ben's drawings, this one decorating the margin of his scratch sheet, a doodle page full of numbers. The top half was all stars, made of sticks and chubby points and perfect triangles interlaced, all the different ways you could think of to draw them. And the bottom was birds, flying and perched, preening and singing from a branch, sparrows and blackbirds and falcons. It didn't look like Ben was thinking about Rory. And all I had been thinking about was Indus, just one constellation in a night sky full of them.

V and Devin locked up the café behind me. “You ready to walk home?” V said.

“I've got somewhere to go first.”

V and Devin walked me two blocks to the house with the red door, so that I wouldn't be on the streets alone at night.

“I'm staying at Devin's, but still don't be out too late,” V said, walking off before the door opened.

A woman stood in the doorway. She was wearing jeans and a red sweatshirt and a delicate gold chain with a cross on the end. Her brown hair was in a perky ponytail on top of her head.

“I'm sorry it's so late. I just got off of work and I was hoping to talk to Ben,” I said.

Her smile flickered and her eyes dropped to my shoes. Ben popped into the hall behind her. “It's a little late for a visitor,” she said, addressing him instead of me but still smiling.

“Just a few minutes,” said Ben. “I can still be in bed by ten.”

The woman looked me over before stepping aside and motioning me through the door. “You and your guest can sit in the living room. What's your name?” she asked as I stepped one boot over the threshold.

“Starbird.”

“How unusual.” She disappeared without introducing herself.

Ben led me to a room at the front of the house where a white rug was nestled beneath white furniture. I looked behind my every step, fearing muddy tracks would trail me in the shape of my boots. On every wall was a painting of a man dressed in robes, with flowing brown hair and a light circling his head. It might have been EARTH when he was younger, but I knew they were paintings of Jesus. We had plenty of Christian books on the Farm.

Ben sat down next to a Bible the size of my history text. “There is this kind of seizure that happens in the frontal lobe of your brain,” he said, instead of hello. He leaned close to me on the couch, his voice barely over a whisper. “The people who have this kind of seizure experience a religious epiphany. They all report seeing God or sensing Him, even the ones who were atheists before.”

“That's interesting,” I said, awkwardly crossing my legs and sitting up too straight.

“It is. It could mean that a major religious experience is just caused by some spasm in the brain, a physical convulsion that makes us believe in religion. But someone else could say that God is the one causing the spasm in the first place, and that our brains were designed by God to have seizures.”

“Oh,” I said, nodding.

“My mom saw God when I was eight years old. She told me about it every night at bedtime for a year afterward. She had never talked about God before that. We didn't even go to church.”

“You think she had a seizure?”

“We were at the park. She was sitting on a bench and I was standing on the top of the monkey bars. She says she wasn't paying attention because she was thinking about how she and Dad were trying to have another baby, and when she looked up, I was swaying dangerously on top like I was going to fall. So she jumped up, but then she fell over onto the ground. She says she looked up, and there was Jesus laying his hands on her head. She was filled with a warm light like liquid silver. She wasn't anxious anymore, or unhappy. Since then, the only thing she has wanted is for me to feel it, too.” Ben swept his hair to one side so I could see his eyes. They looked brown and sad. Extra puddle-y.

“I came to tell you that I've been practicing flirting with you,” I said.

“You're good at it.”

“I mean, I've known Indus my whole life and I always thought that we—”

“He seems cool. I get it.”

“He is, but we're not together. We were just talking.”

“Oh.”

“And I was practicing flirting with you, but I wasn't sure if I wanted to flirt with you because you're—” I didn't want to say it.

“I'm what?”

“You're not like me.”

“I'm really sorry about saying that cult thing.”

“No, it's okay. I mean, I'm not mad.”

“Did you make a lot of money today?”

“You should know, you wrote it down.”

“Oh yeah.” He laughed.

“Do you think she had a seizure?”

“Yes, maybe. I don't know. When I was ten, I was being really bratty and terrible one day, and she locked me in a closet and said I couldn't come out until I saw Jesus. After an hour, I said I saw him and she made me sit at the kitchen table and describe exactly what he looked like before she would let me have lunch.”

“What about your dad?” I peered behind me into the hall.

“I started having insomnia after the closet thing, so Dad insisted on a psychiatrist. But my mom said it had to be a Christian psychiatrist, and when I went to one, he kept steering the conversation back to my ‘crisis of faith' and using Bible quotes.” Ben twisted his thin arms together at the elbow as he spoke. I thought about him picking up the pumpkins. “So when I asked if your family was a cult—”

“EARTH's coming back.”

“EARTH?”

“He's, like, kind of our leader. Well, not our leader. I mean, I don't follow him or anything. But he Translates for us. Anyway, he called the café tonight.”

“Are you excited?”

“I think he'll be proud of me,” I said, realizing it myself. EARTH was going to be proud of me. “Indus is just my friend. I wanted him to be something else for a while, but he isn't, and when he was touching my hair, we were just talking.”

Ben, on the white couch, looked at me.

“Do you like Rory?” I said.

“No.”

“I thought you did.”

“I don't.”

“But you guys text.”

“Everybody texts.”

“Benny?” A man in pleated khaki pants and a white button-down shirt appeared at the living room entrance. “Close to bedtime.” The man smiled broadly and extended a hand toward me. “I'm Ben's father, Mr. Fisher.”

I still wasn't used to handshakes. I tried to act natural as our palms touched.

“Good night, Dad,” said Ben, and his father left.

“So, thanks again for your help today and with the flyers and everything.” I stood on the snowy carpet.

“Sure, no problem. I like your family.” Ben stood, too.

“So, I'll see you in math.” I walked toward the door.

“Yeah, math.” Ben followed me.

Just as I reached for the doorknob, Ben touched my arm, the right one just below the elbow. I turned to look at him and he did not kiss me. He didn't push me up against the wall or press his body against mine. He just touched me on my arm, and that's when I learned that touching a girl's arm can sometimes be more powerful than kissing her against a tree under the moonlight.