The Chaos of Stars

“You got beat up by a girl?” Scott’s eyes light up with wonder and delight.

“No! She thought—do I have to tell this? We dated for a little while and then broke up, but she was really upset about it. It got so awkwa

rd I ended up eating lunch in the boys’ bathroom every day for the last two months of school to avoid her.”

“Oh, that’s so sad!” Tyler says.

“Was she ugly?” Scott asks, writing his name beneath the tic-tac-toe board.

“No, just not my type. She was pretty enough. Kinda short. Blond. Very . . . orange.”

Tyler finishes her last piece. “Fish-belly white is the new tan. But what is your type, if it isn’t short and fake-baked?”

He smiles, not looking at me in a way I swear is so deliberate it feels like he is staring right at me. He turns toward Tyler while he leans in closer to me, his shoulder almost brushing mine. “It’s a very, very specific type. And does not include the color orange.”

Scott brings his paintbrush up to Tyler’s face, tracing it along her jawline. “What’s your type, Tyler?”

“Half-Taiwanese, obnoxious, and soaking wet.” With a roar she grabs Scott under his arms, dragging him toward the pool. He stands and they wrestle back and forth until they both trip over the edge and fall in with a massive splash.

I watch them and laugh, loopy with fatigue and grateful that the tarp is far enough away from the edge that they didn’t get it wet. Tyler and Scott scream, pushing each other under the water. “We’ll have to have a pool party or something when we finish this,” I muse, mostly to myself. I want to buy strings of lanterns to give Deena and Sirus as a thank-you gift. They’d light up this area so pretty at night.

“So, we’re done here, right?” Ry asks.

I nod. “Thanks. You can go home. I’ll call you when we’re ready to paint more.”

“Who said I wanted to go home?”

I notice the twist in his smile too late. With a roar of his own, far deeper than Tyler’s, he throws me over his shoulder, runs, and leaps into the pool. I push him away, surfacing with an angry splutter as my hair funnels streams of water right into my eyes. Ry jumps up next to me, laughing as he shakes his head and sprinkles me more.

“You jackal! Why did you do that?”

He stops laughing and looks at me with utter sincerity. “You looked really hot. I thought this would help. It didn’t.”

“Ha. Ha.” I hook my foot around his ankle, yank it out from under him, and shove his head under. When I finally let him up, Scott jumps on my back, screaming, “Boys against girls!”

Tyler jumps on Scott on my back and we all go under, Scott with a death-grip on my tank top. I finally wriggle away, surfacing for air with a gasp. The last time I was stuck underwater . . . I remember. The dream. But it wasn’t a dream.

Isis had taken me to the banks of the Nile like she did most days. I was playing in the sand while she searched for whatever she needed to collect for our spells. A shadow blocked the sun and I looked up to see tall, tall Anubis.

“Hello,” he said, with his sharp teeth.

“Hi.”

“Do you know how to swim?” he asked.

“No.”

“Well then, time to learn!” He picked me up and threw me straight out into the middle of the river before I could even process what was happening.

I sank. I’d never been in the water without my mother before, and she wasn’t there, and I didn’t know what to do without her. The water was murky and stung my eyes, but I knew if I waited, my mother would come for me.

She had to. She always came for me.

And when my chest hurt so much I wanted to cry and I couldn’t hold my breath any longer, instead of inky blackness claiming me like in the dream, those hands I knew better than any others in the world grabbed me and pulled me up into the air.

It was the only time I’d ever seen my mother cry. I was upset and crying and she was, too, screaming at Anubis, who was laughing and telling her to calm down, it was all a joke.

That’s why he was banned from our house! I can’t believe I blocked that out. And I can’t believe that when I next saw him, just before coming here, he genuinely didn’t recognize me, didn’t even remember what he’d done. That’s how unimportant I am.