The Chaos of Stars

I do, and tiny pieces of flavored ice run along my tongue and coat my throat with freezing sweetness until they settle in my stomach with an odd, burning sort of cold. I laugh, delighted. It was all I could do to persuade Isis to let me get a fridge and freezer for the kitchen when I redid it. She’s still convinced that eating things colder than room temperature makes you sick. Ice was always out of the question. “This is my mother’s worst nightmare! I’m drinking freezing-cold sugar and I’m with a Greek boy!”

Ry’s face lights up, and we walk in companionable brain freeze along the harbor toward where he parked a few blocks away.

“Oh, hey!” He stops and pulls out his phone, then stands next to me and holds it away from us. “Stick out your tongue.”

“What are you doing?”

“Taking our picture!”

“Why?”

“Clearly you are not on Facebook. This is what teenagers are supposed to do. We take pictures of ourselves.”

“That’s . . . fun?”

He laughs. “Just stick out your tongue.”

Raising an eyebrow suspiciously at him, I do as I’m told, to see that my tongue is an unnatural shade of blue. He leans into me holding the camera out at arm’s length and takes a picture of us sticking out our flavored-sugar tongues. He brings it back and shows me the picture and . . .

I look so happy. It’s almost startling; I haven’t seen many pictures of myself recently, but in the ones I have seen, I look . . . ah, floods, Tyler’s right. I usually look angry. And if I look happy in this picture, Ry looks like a constellation of joy.

“Want me to send it to you?” he asks, and I nod. He taps fluidly on his phone and I take the opportunity to walk a couple steps away from where our shoulders were brushing. “Oh, hey, that’s right. Tyler wants to do movies tonight.” He looks up expectantly, and his face is so open and happy that it hurts.

I spend a lot of time being angry. It’s making me tired. I want to look happy like Ry all the time. “I’ll be there.”

“Great! I didn’t tell you, my mom had the room entirely redone based on your advice. I wrote down everything you said. She thought it was brilliant. So you get to come and see the fruits of your genius.”

“Did you do the popcorn machine?”

“First thing that went in.”

“I wouldn’t dream of being anywhere else.”

And that’s how, three hours later, I find myself snuggled into a couch in the dark in a room I designed, perfectly happy.

And that’s how, three hours and fifteen minutes later, I feel Ry’s hand slip into mine.

For that single second before I pull my hand away, before my brain and will and resolve kick in, it’s like magic. Real magic, not the stupid blessed-amulet kind, not the using-the-right-words-that-Isadora-can-never-know kind, but electricity and butterflies and a feeling of everything in the universe suddenly lining up exactly so and opening up an entirely new way to see, to do, to be.

I yank my hand away. It’s too much. I can’t—I can’t feel this. I can’t do this. I stand and flee the room before he can finish saying my name, run out of his house, start the long walk home with tears in my eyes.

Butterflies are stupid, fragile things that have beautiful and tragically short lives. Electricity kills people. I don’t need a new person to suddenly spring up under my skin and push out who I was, who I’ve already decided to be. Those feelings have no place in my life and I will not let myself be a fool in love, with love, let it take over and destroy me.

Love isn’t magic. Just like my family, just like my place in the universe, it’s something that I can’t keep, can’t make last.

I would rather lose Ry before I ever have him.

I stand in front of the mural, glaring at the image of my mother leaning over my father’s dead body as she lovingly puts all of the pieces of him back together so that he can be given life again.

“Isadora,” she says behind me, but I don’t turn. I won’t. She keeps trying to talk to me, trying to explain, but I won’t let her. I don’t want to hear her pretend like she loves me, pretend like I am anything other than her clever solution to the problem of no more worshippers.

“Isadora,” she says, and this time her voice is hard and sharp, making a headache blossom behind my right eye. Still I don’t turn, so she walks around, putting herself between the mural and me.

“Please,” she says, and the tone in her voice is something I’ve never heard. I’ve heard her be gentle and sweet, but she sounds almost . . . desperate. “Please talk to me. Please let me help you.”

I take a step back, narrowing my eyes, and fold my arms across my chest. “I can’t stop you from talking. But I never have to listen to you again.”

Rage blazes in her eyes, but is quickly snuffed out by something deeper and sadder, something that, for a fraction of a second, makes me want to step forward and wrap my arms around her in a hug. Comfort her.