Catch a Falling Star Read online

  Then Parker launched into what could only be described as a sales pitch. Adam’s “people” thought it might be good for his image if he spent some time with a “small-town girl with proper values.” Someone, Parker explained, who’d make it look like he was mending his ways, someone people could really fall in love with. “We think you’re the girl, Carter. You’re a perfect cast.”

  “I wasn’t aware I was auditioning.” I stood, crossing to the rack of chips and granola bars, fiddling with them just so he wouldn’t see my hands shaking.

  He leaned back in his chair, appraising me. “It’s not dirty or inappropriate. Strictly PG stuff. Pure Disney. Hand holding. Some walks with your dog.”

  He knew I had a dog?

  Standing, he slipped his iPhone back into the frayed pocket of his jeans. I’m sure he’d paid extra for that fraying. “We’re just asking you to hang out with the bloke for a few weeks. Millions of other birds would kill for this sort of offer.”

  Ugh. Everything bad about Hollywood started with some version of that line. “I’m not millions of other birds.” Okay, that also sounded like something a girl in this exact position was supposed to say. I crossed my arms, shrugging. “Look, this is really weird. And … flattering, I guess. But I’m sorry. I’m just not interested.” I forced myself to make eye contact with him.

  The pale light swirling through the windows bathed his face. “Might be some good connections, too. You’ll be a senior in the fall, yes? Could be a good way to see what life has to offer outside this place.”

  Now he was just being condescending. I started collecting the plates someone had left on the counter. “Some people do actually choose to live here.”

  He looked like he might say something else but thought otherwise. “So, you’re saying no?”

  “Right. I’m saying no.” I dumped the plates in a busing tray.

  He gave me a look close to respect. “Well, that’s new. We’re not used to hearing no in Adam’s world. Rather, when it’s not coming from a studio. I mean, if they could fuel their Priuses on the collective desperation in that town, we’d solve a major global crisis.” He chuckled at his own cleverness. Pausing, he cocked his head to the side. “Is it Priuses? Or Priusi?” More chuckling.

  Geez. This guy was in love with himself. I migrated back to the perfectly stacked granola bars. If he were any reflection of Adam Jakes, I wouldn’t want to hang out with Adam for three minutes, much less the next three weeks.

  Parker nodded as if I’d asked him to leave. “Listen, love, take the night to think about it. No need to decide now. We’ll ring you in the morning. Or you can ring me.” He left a cream business card on the counter. “Oh, and we’d appreciate your discretion.”

  “You don’t want people thinking Adam can’t get his own dates?” I tried to sound glib, but my voice shook.

  He heard it. With a wide smile that didn’t reach his eyes, he told me, “I’m just asking for a little discretion. This was merely an idea we thought we’d look into.” He looked around the café. “This can’t be an easy place to run, and I understand you’ve had some, well, financial trouble with your brother. Perhaps this could help with that.”

  Heat flooded my face. “I think you should go.”

  “It would be easy work, and we’d pay you quite handsomely.” He handed me a slip of paper with a number on it. A large number.

  I balked, staring at it. “Is this for real?”

  “Please.” He frowned, slipping his sunglasses down off the top of his head, turning his eyes to mirrors. “Of course it’s real, love. What did you say earlier to that protester? It’s not amateur hour.”

  The paper felt heavy in my hands. “You know, entire families in Little live on this kind of money for a whole year.”

  He grinned. “Not in my world. Cheers.” Then he left, the café bell jingling behind him.

  The lights in Chloe’s pool cast the world in a pale green glow. Behind us, the drip system for her mother’s rose garden whispered on, soaking the dirt rings around their gnarled trunks. I drifted in the center of the pool on a clear raft, the interconnecting pockets of the raft also glowing. Chloe had some soft indie folk I didn’t recognize playing low on the stereo and it glazed the air around me, putting me in a trance.

  Something cold hit my back. Chloe was chucking ice cubes from her Diet Coke at me. “Did you hear me? Earth to Moon.” This was one of Alien Drake’s and Chloe’s favorite things to say to me when I zoned out. Of course, with a last name like Moon, I’d heard far worse.

  “I heard you.” I flipped over, the raft swaying in the night water.

  “Okay, so you’re just ignoring me.”

  Above me, the stars arched their twinkling backs. “How long does it take him to heat up a pizza? I told Dad I’d be home by midnight.” I watched the door, where Alien Drake had disappeared almost a half hour before. We hadn’t seen him since.

  “He’s probably talking to my dad about the UFO sighting in Scotland,” Chloe said, an ice cube plunking into the pool next to me. “Did you see him today?”

  “A UFO?”

  Another near miss with an ice cube, this one with more velocity. “I was at that stupid set for two hours and no sign of him.”

  The night had cooled, and I shivered on the raft. I paddled my way toward the side. “You sure it was the set that was stupid?”

  Chloe was curled up on a squishy lounge chair, a huge towel around her. She lowered her voice. “Come on, Carter, I can’t talk about him around Drake. He gets mad.”

  “Because you’re lusting after a guy who isn’t him? How dare he.” I grabbed at the side of the pool, steadying myself.

  “He’s a movie star. He obviously has nothing to worry about.”

  “Drake or Adam?”

  Chloe glared at me through the shadows. I couldn’t actually see her, but I could feel her glaring. “Well, not everyone can be so above it all, Ms. Small Town U.S.A.”

  The back door slammed, the smell of pizza drifting across the pool. “Right now, I’m Ms. Starving U.S.A.” I pulled myself onto the side of the pool, the raft drifting away like a ghost to the center again. I went over to where Alien Drake had rested the pizza on the low brick wall that ran the length of the pool. “Mmmm … Want one?” I held out a slice to Chloe, a saucy peace offering.

  “Yes, please! Yum,” she said, taking a bite, then giggling as a long string of cheese fastened itself between the slice and her chin. Alien Drake handed her a napkin. He settled into a lounge chair next to her, half the pizza in a heap on his plate.

  I listened to them chewing and talking about the UFO sighting in Scotland. In the ease of the moment, here in the night glow of the pool, I almost told them, Parker’s offer bubbling up like lava, but I stopped myself. I knew I couldn’t tell them. Chloe would freak out and think I should do it, and I’d never hear the end of the surely relentless mocking from Alien Drake.

  Sighing, I chewed my piece of pizza and stared out over the pool. Alien Drake shot me a look. “You okay?”

  Before I could answer, my cell buzzed. I reached for it. Dad calling. “Hello?”

  “Where are you?”

  My skin tingled at the tense tremble of his voice. “I’m at Chloe’s.”

  “Is John, by any chance, with you?”

  “No.”

  Dad sighed into the phone. “Okay.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “Just come to the café.” He hung up.

  Someone had thrown something through the front window of the café, the part with the cream-and-black etching of Little Eats. When I got there, John sat on the curb in a pool of light from the streetlamp, his face in his hands, and Dad spoke with a dark-haired policeman I didn’t recognize. Dad had turned on the lights inside the café, but most of the outside felt shadowed and strange. It wasn’t often I saw the café at midnight.

  I sat down next to John. “What happened?”

  He motioned behind him. “Someone threw a brick through the window.”r />
  Obviously. I forced my voice to sound patient. “Do we know who?” I watched Dad, his face sagging, his gaze clouded and sad.

  John’s eyes darted like bats away from mine. “How would I know?”

  He knew. My brother’s eyes did that every time he lied. Once, after Halloween when I was six and he was eight, he ate every last Snickers out of my candy bag and then lied about it, said they hadn’t made Snickers in Fun Size that year, his eyes laser-tagging all over the place.

  Lately, I just called him on it, a recent development he did not care for. “You’re lying.”

  “Shut up, Carter.” He sank his face into his hands again.

  Maybe it was the shadows. Or the dark quiet of downtown. Maybe it was the stretch of glinting sky that didn’t change above me no matter what was happening down here on Earth, but I asked him, for the first time, “How much money do you owe T.J. Shay?”

  He pushed himself up, scowling. “Don’t get involved. This is none of your business, and it’s not Mom and Dad’s business.”

  Next to me, the moon shimmered in shattered pieces of glass on the ground, the sky insisting on its beauty even in the broken places. “It seems like a brick through their window is their business.”

  I had pushed it too far. His face went slack, as if his eyes, nose, mouth, cheeks, and chin just sort of collectively gave up, and he turned and headed down the middle of the dark street.

  At home, Dad opened a beer, slumping into a chair at the kitchen table. I put a kettle on for tea and slipped into the chair next to him. “Did you call Mom?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  He sighed. “You know how she gets.”

  Over the last four years, I’d watched the situation with John slowly deplete both of my parents. At first, they were confused, determined. Then, angry. Neither of them yelled, so the fights with John about his gambling, about his lying, about his stealing, stretched into the taffy-tight air of the house, low murmurs in the night when they thought I was asleep, John’s voice oscillating over the years between pleading, defensiveness, apology, fatigue.

  Then, after he stole from the café, something just broke, and he was “living somewhere else” or “not around for a while.” In his absence, our family lived in an easy space. No drama. No tension. Just the daily rhythm of the café, of school, of regular life.

  I loved my brother, but I preferred the ease of his absence.

  Mostly, though, I missed our old family, the one before John started lying, stealing. Before he started betting. We were a different-shaped family then. When I was little, John was the sort of big brother all my friends wished they had. He built fairy houses with me under the shade of the old maple in the yard, hanging wind chimes and scattering colored drops of glass he called dragon tears through the salt-and-pepper gravel, the light dappling him through the feathered green leaves. All through middle school I’d find notes in my dance bag taped to Snickers bars, Post-its on the bathroom mirror with funny animal pictures; and every Christmas morning, he’d wake me up early, before Mom and Dad got up, and we’d sneak downstairs and rearrange all the presents. The first time, it totally freaked Mom out because we both knew she’d never really stopped believing in Santa. Not really.

  Then, somewhere along the way, it just began to change shape. Not all at once, which is why I didn’t notice it at first. Like a perfectly round ball of dough that sinks and flattens, he changed our shape. I was too old for fairy houses, but everything else stopped, too. The notes stopped. The Post-its stopped. The Christmas mornings stopped. Every week, it seemed, he slipped out pieces of the life he’d built with us, breaking it down like a bird’s nest in reverse, one small ribbon of string or branch at a time unwoven and carried away.

  I stood now in the dim light of our night kitchen and poured hot water over a mint tea bag in a blue ceramic mug. The clock ticked on the wall. The crickets sounded through the open window of the kitchen. I stared out into the black of the backyard, at the monster form of the maple tree, at the silhouette of our garage. “Dad?”

  “Yeah?”

  “If T.J. doesn’t get his money, will he just keep throwing bricks, or something worse?”

  Dad hesitated. Occasionally, he and Mom talked about John’s gambling in passing, the way you would about something you read in the newspaper or overheard at the café. But they never really talked to me about it. About the darker pieces. They hid it away, as if it were contagious, so it didn’t infect me, their whole, functioning daughter. “Much worse, honey.”

  “Why don’t you tell the police?” My hands felt cold, even holding the warm blue mug.

  “It’s complicated.” Dad’s standard answer when he didn’t know the answer. “Besides” — he pulled from his beer — “it might be easier to just pay T.J. off — get John a fresh start.”

  My stomach turned. I’d heard that before. How many fresh starts was a person allowed? Two? Ten? As many as it took? “Maybe we could get him back into treatment.” Six months ago, he’d emerged from a place in Napa, his face smooth, his eyes two bright spots of promise, a look I recognized from days when he and I would lie in the grass and make shapes out of clouds. Like the time when cloud watching seemed entirely enough to him.

  “Yeah.” Dad sighed again, finishing his beer. He set the clear bottle on the table, rolling it back and forth in his hand. “I’m afraid that’s a bit out of our range right now.”

  I pulled Parker’s paper from my pocket and pushed it across the table to him, my stomach a fist. “Maybe not.”

  the next morning before we opened, Parker knocked again, and Dad let him in. Dressed casually in jeans and a T-shirt, he smiled eagerly at both of us. “All right, then? You’re a go?” He didn’t even seem to notice the window, the huge piece of black plastic taped over it.

  “Guess you get to fill up your Prius,” I mumbled from behind the counter, my hands cupped around a steaming cup of coffee.

  Dad shot me a strange look, looking tired and rumpled in his Little Eats T-shirt and khaki shorts. Dad wasn’t a small guy, his broad shoulders still echoing his stint on the Little football team in high school, but today he seemed like someone had taken an eraser to all his edges, diminished him.

  Last night, he’d said no right away. “It’s offensive.”

  Was it? It had weirded me out, but I didn’t feel offended. “They’re not asking me to do anything other than sell an image.” Of course, I wasn’t totally sure how I felt about that part of it.

  “That makes you sound like a Pepsi commercial.” Dad had frowned at his empty beer bottle. “Your mother would flip out.”

  She would. I thought about how I could explain it to Mom. “What if I was just doing it as some sort of social experiment?”

  Dad widened his eyes at me. “God, have we been such horrible parents that you’d think there’s a way to spin this?” He tossed the bottle into our recycle bin.

  But I could feel his moral boundaries growing mutable like gum, so I pulled my last card. “I’m a responsible person, Dad. I’ve always been responsible. You have no reason not to trust me.”

  “I know.” He studied a spot behind me on the wall, turning it over in his mind. “It doesn’t sound like they’re asking you to do anything other than hang out with the guy.” He sighed. “I mean, it’s not something I’d want to do.”

  “No offense, Dad, but I’m not sure that’s the angle they’re going for.”

  His gaze rested back on me. “Okay. But, before you say yes to this, I need you to think about something. You’re a private girl. A really private girl. I’m not sure you’ll like getting wrapped up in that world. It’ll be very intrusive, Carter. Not just to you. They’re going to dig.”

  “I know.”

  “I’m not sure you do.”

  “I’m not that interesting.”

  “You’ll be who Adam Jakes is choosing, and for some sick cultural reason we’d need your mother to explain, that will make you interesting enough.” He stood, the
chair scraping the floor. “But I do trust you, so I’m going to let this be your call.”

  Now, Parker stood near the drink cases of our café, calmly reading our specials board still left over from yesterday. Catching my eye, he said, “We’ll wait for Adam and go over the ground rules.” He checked his phone.

  “Adam’s coming here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now?”

  “Is that a problem?” Parker glanced up.

  “Nope.” My voice came out a squeak. I moved from behind the counter to one of the tables, sipping my coffee, the confidence I’d felt last night draining from me.

  Several minutes later, Parker let Adam Jakes in through our kitchen door. Seeing him move into the café, sunglasses flashing even though the morning light was still more the blue haze of dawn than bright, anxiety flooded my body, and I wanted to take back the phone call I’d made as soon as I had woken up at four thirty this morning.

  This was definitely not okay, social experiment or otherwise.

  Adam Jakes stopped, pushed his glasses up into his tousled hair, and, for the first time, looked at me, a look that clearly said he’d rather be anywhere else in the world but here. I managed a wobbly smile. What must this tabloid boy — this fast-car, fast-girl, rehabed movie star — think of the brown-ponytailed small-town girl standing in front of him? Me. Carter Moon. I had knobby knees, an uneven tan, a slow car, and the hardest drug I’d ever tried was an oregano cigarette in fifth grade that made me swear off pizza for six weeks.

  “Um, hey,” I mustered awkwardly. “I’m Carter.”

  “Hi, Carter,” he purred, the lights from the drink cases reflecting in the mirrored lenses perched in his hair. “Let’s get the basics down; you should pay attention.” His eyes darted around our café. “Do you need a minute?”

  “Why would I need a minute?”

  “Sometimes girls need a minute after they’ve met me. You know, to get over the shock.” He flopped into a chair at a nearby table, suddenly absorbed in his phone.

  I glanced at Parker, who sort of half frowned at Adam. Maybe I should tell him I needed a minute to get over the fact that I’d just committed to spending a huge chunk of my summer with a guy who seemed to have the social awareness of a two-year-old. Biting that gem back, I asked instead, “Do either of you want something to drink?” I shot a glance at Dad, who stood quietly behind the counter, eyes narrowed, watching Adam with the same look he got watching his 49ers botch an important football game. I could feel his mind changing, too.