The Truth About Fragile Things (20 page)

I laughed in spite of myself.

Charlotte stood up, walked around me to sit next to Phillip. She scrutinized him, pinching her bottom lip between her thumb and finger. “So you are a boy scout and a singer and an actor and you go camping and…stuff.”

“Was that a question?” He grinned, his chest puffing out.

“No, just an inventory. Sing a song.” She slammed down her command like a short order cook. It was much more dare than request.

Phillip didn’t flinch. His eyes grew more amused. “Which one?”

“One from the musical you were in last year.” They sat so close, their knees almost touched, but his head rose well above hers.

Phillip’s voice shattered the still night, jumped out fearless and strong. He dove into the first line of ‘The Street Where You Live’ and laughed when he didn’t a hit a note, pounded his chest, took a quick breath, and shaped the sound easily the next time he came to it. I could tell he loved the look of shock on Charlotte’s face, loved the way her shoulders jerked when his volume rose.

If you didn’t know about the Beevis and Butthead voice and his preoccupation with bathroom jokes and his annoying lack of maturity, you would think Phillip was beautiful when he sang. He could do it in a way that was triumphant and self-deprecating, laughing at himself and mastering the notes all in one breath. Charlotte wiggled backwards, embarrassed, turned her face toward the ground and refused to raise it until he finished. When he let the sound expand over the hillside, ricochet off the treetops I looked around for people, wondering if they would follow the song and come to investigate. I half expected a park ranger to threaten us with a ticket for noise after ten o’clock.

But when he finished I gave him a thorough round of applause and then pinched his cheek just hard enough to hurt. “You are very cute when you sing. I could almost keep you for a pet.”

He flicked my hand away and pulled gently on Charlotte’s hair. “Your turn.”

That got her attention. She whipped her head up and demanded to know what he meant.

“You know you want to sing. I did it. You do it.”

“I don’t want to.” She stomped back to her sleeping bag and shoved her legs inside. Uncomfortable silence reigned for three seconds before she screamed. I squealed in reaction, jerked my body away from her, and scoured the ground for snakes or other terrible creatures.

She pointed up, her finger jerking over our heads. “I saw one. I saw one.”

I ducked, envisioning bats or other terrors but she continued. “I saw…one of the…stars…go…”

“Fall?” Phillip finished calmly for her.

“Yes!” she screamed. “It actually did the whole streaky light thing.” Her finger pantomimed a long arch over the sky and I followed it, imagining the trail of light.

“I thought it didn’t start for three more hours,” I said while I looked up, afraid I missed the only one. I don’t know why, but I didn’t actually believe in meteor showers yet. And if they did exist, I didn’t think I would ever be lucky enough to witness one.

“Just a scout flying ahead of the others. They’re coming,” Phillip promised.

“That was so pretty,” Charlotte exclaimed. Her chin pointed up, the moonlight felt its way down her long, smooth throat. I saw Phillip’s expression change as he watched her, his eyes scanned her face, ran along the strands of her impossibly thick hair. He turned away when he saw me looking at him, laid back down on his blanket, swallowed too many times. His Adam’s apple bounced uncomfortably as he pretended to concentrate on the sky.

“So there really will be more?” I asked. The sky looked so static and unchangeable. I couldn’t imagine one of those pinpricks of light tearing loose and cutting through the black fabric of night.

“There should be,” Phillip said. “I can’t believe it’s this warm and this clear and we got here. I’m particularly impressed by you, Megan. Jolly good work convincing the parents.” He said it with a stiff lip like a British man holding a pipe between his teeth.

There was idle, meaningless chit chat that lagged and lulled, filled in the minutes while we watched the sky, unwilling to miss another meteor. As midnight neared I thought Charlotte had dozed off while Phillip and I reminisced about our favorite parts in past productions. I was pulling out my best Oizer impersonation from Steel Magnolias when Charlotte’s quiet voice made me jump.

“I read
Grapes of Wrath
. Twice.”

I turned to look at her, wondering where her meandering voice would take us, and Phillip sat up so he could see her speak.

“I read
Of Mice and Men
and
the Jungle
and biographies of Bonnie and Clyde.” There was something helpless in her voice as she recited her strange list. Her last word caught and tore, released a small gasp. “I didn’t even like
Grapes of Wrath
. I don’t care about the dust bowl. I pretend I do, but I don’t really.” A tear fell out of her eyes, rolled down her upturned face, and disappeared into her hair. She blinked and another followed before she swiped her hand across her wet skin.

“Did you like
Of Mice and Men
?” Phillip asked. “Because it changed me.”

“Phillip,” I whispered through clenched teeth.

She plowed on despite us, despite the weight of sadness I could almost see pressed to her soft chest. “I’m nothing like him. I didn’t get any of him. I think I didn’t. I don’t even know for sure.”

The wind felt cold on my wet eyes and I pushed my hand against my heart, willed it not to complain with sharp, hard beats. It was the sting that came with breathing that pushed the words out. “I’m so sorry, Charlotte. I keep thinking if I could go back I would tell him to just let the car hit me. I didn’t have a life yet and…”

“Shut up, Megan,” Phillip growled. My mouth snapped closed, surprised by the bitterness of his tone. He stood up and walked away, leaving us to exchange confused looks, her worried eyes asking me what to do. The unspoken question was so clear I shrugged and my eyes dried in the wind of his cold departure. I didn’t know whether to apologize or demand an apology. Fifteen feet away Phillip’s silhouette raked a hand through his hair, a fast and angry gesture.

“What’s wrong, Phil?” Charlotte asked. That only made him take several steps farther away before he sat down.

I stood up, grabbing my flashlight to pick my steps carefully. “Phillip? I wasn’t trying to make you mad.” When I sat down beside him he didn’t extend a friendly arm, wouldn’t even look at me.

Charlotte lowered herself on his other side, rested her head on his shoulder. “Megan didn’t mean she wanted to die.”

I thought he would shrug her away, push us both away, but after a moment more of his stony silence he sighed and laid his hand on Charlotte’s head. His fingers followed the long locks, stroking them where they fell almost to the black floor of the hillside. “There’s no side to pick here,” he said in a deep, low voice. “If your dad wasn’t there Megan wouldn’t be here and then I’d just be a jerk without a best friend.”

“You aren’t a jerk,” I answered reflexively, but my voice was thick as I pushed it past the pain in my throat.

Phillip barely paused. “And if he hadn’t saved her you would have had him all this time and you’d be happy.”

“I don’t think I was made to be happy,” Charlotte’s response was as fast and unthinking as mine.

Phil’s hand came to a rest on her shoulder, some of her hair wound around his fingers. I looked away, up to the sky. “Remember the falls today?” he said. “Remember almost falling in? We call that happy.”

“It’s like moments,” Charlotte said. “Just the in-betweens.”

A streakof light.

“Did you see that?” I asked, pointing up to the sky, but Phillip and Charlotte’s fingers beat me there. “I saw a falling star!” I could still see the line of light across the sky where it had burned, yellow and surprisingly slow.

“That was a good one,” Phillip said, his voice finally brightening.

Charlotte threw her arms around Phillip and pulled me into the hug with a sharp tug on my sleeve. “You guys actually brought me to see a meteor shower. Thank you.”

Despite the sweatshirt I’d put on I shivered and longed for the shelter of my sleeping bag. We made our way back to our bags and burrowed inside, but this time Charlotte settled on Phillip’s other side, leaving the left side of me exposed and vulnerable. I shuffled deep into my bag, letting it protect me from the shadowy trees at the edge of the clearing.

Now nothing could turn our eyes from the sky. What had looked ancient and immutable an hour ago now looked fluid, a dance of lights, a shimmer of movement. Phillip sang an old song, a Simon and Garfunkel his mother raised him on. And at one in the morning, beneath stars that could not keep their place in the heavens, it sounded brand new, like no one had ever whispered those notes before.  I realized that someday someone would fall in love with Phillip in spite of Phillip because he could sing the stars out of the sky.

We stopped squealing and exclaiming when they streaked through the night and just inhaled, each one a new shock, each one as startling as the first. I wondered if Bryon got a star, if every soul turned into light, distant and brilliant. And if so, what did the falling ones mean? And before I could remind myself that they were just space rocks crashing into our thick atmosphere, burning through our oxygen I felt tears running down the back of my neck. I was glad Phillip had turned off the lantern. Glad for the secret cloak of night. But still, in the dark, I could see the black shape of Charlotte’s hand inside Phillip’s and felt cold and alone, broken and breaking. Some of the shame of lying to my parents crept into my stomach and I said a silent plea to the sky, hoping it would find them and convince them to forgive me in advance because I knew someday I would tell them. I would tell them everything, except the way I was hurting.

My breathing slowed until I fell asleep in the thin space between earth and sky while stars spiraled down to hear the song floating around our faces.

T
he first sensation
of waking was the cold. It had thickened and hardened sometime between my last thoughts and the gray light of morning. My breath smoked against the day as I blinked, orienting myself with one fact at a time: the hard ground, my sore feet, the goosebumps tangling my arm hair in the fleece of my sweatshirt, a new day, Phillip three feet away. I shivered and felt the same shame that had crept into my last thoughts of the night. But darkness had offered a soothing sedative. With day came a sharp regret. I raked through the night, searched for a word I shouldn’t have said, a gesture, a feeling to account for my embarrassment. I turned my eyes to him slowly, saw he was awake, his eyes blinking up at the dawn. I watched him while he still thought I was sleeping and saw Charlotte’s hand was out of her sleeping bag, extended toward him, but empty. He was too quiet. I’d never seen him think so hard. I tried to ignore how my hair must look, or how my mouth tasted, or the thick smell of smoke that clung to my clothes and said his name so softly my voice cracked.

His shoulders jerked just a fraction but he didn’t look at me. “Morning.”

“What time is it?”

He didn’t look at his watch. “Almost six.”

“What temperature is it?” I asked, longing for our campfire that would be dead and ashes by now.

“About fifty degrees.”

Even though I worried our quiet conversation would disturb her, Charlotte slept on, her cheek round and soft where it pressed into her sleeping bag, her hair rumpled and tangled. I asked him how we had all fallen asleep and never made it back to our hammocks.

“I didn’t fall asleep,” Phillip said.

My head rose in shock, hoped he was kidding. “All night? Why not?”

When he turned to me his face looked purple in strange places, not just under his eyes, but in the hollows of his cheeks, even his lips. “You look awful,” I told him. “Are you sick?”

“I’m screwed. I need to go get our fire started. Your nose is red.”

“Your lips are blue.”

He sat up, careful not to make noise. He kept his eyes on Charlotte, trying not to wake her and I knew whatever was wrong with him had nothing to do with germs or cold. “What’s wrong?” I dared to ask. “Why are you screwed?”