The Brightest Stars

“Do you have a family?” I assumed he wouldn’t answer, but anything was better than silence.

“Do I have a family?” he repeated.

“I mean, obviously you have a family, otherwise you literally wouldn’t exist. But are they like that?” I nodded toward the house.

“Nope,” he said, staring out the windshield of my car. “Not at all.”

“In a good way or a bad way?” I asked.

“Both.” He shrugged, buckling his seat belt.

“I think it just bothers me this much because Estelle is so different from my mom. She was really fun when I was young. My mom, not Estelle,” I clarified, though he didn’t ask. “She used to laugh and listen to music. She would dance around the living room listening to Van Morrison, waving her arms around like a bird or a butterfly. It feels like a lifetime ago.”

I was thinking back to that other version of my mom, the one who had long, flowing hair that moved in the wind. She was just as carefree now, but not even close to the same way.

“She used to lift her hands up and push them through her hair, letting it fall around her. It always tickled my face and I would laugh and she would shake her hair and dance around me.”

The thrum of my engine cutting through the thick Georgia air was all I could hear. I’d never noticed the sounds before; I’d never had time to.

“And my birthday parties! She used to go all out for them. It was this huge thing, more like a birthday week. We didn’t have a ton of money or anything, but she was creative. One year she decorated the whole house in those lights from Spencer’s, do you remember that store?”

He nodded.

“They had these disco lights and my mom put them all around our living room and kitchen. All of our friends came over. I mean, I only had like three friends, most of the kids came for Austin. We always had a packed house. I had this boyfriend—I think his name was Josh? And he brought me cornbread. That was my birthday gift.”

I didn’t know why I was going into such detail, but I was so lost in my own memories that I just kept going.

“I don’t know why he brought me cornbread. Maybe his mom just had it lying around? I don’t know. But I remember getting this karaoke machine and thinking it was the coolest present ever and my mom went into her room and locked the door so we could feel older than we were and not be chaperoned the entire time. Of course, we ended up playing one of those stupid party games and I had to kiss a boy named Joseph, who actually just overdosed on heroine a few months ago …”

I could feel Kael looking at me, but it was the weirdest thing—I couldn’t stop myself from talking. We were at a red light. The sky was pitch-black and the red lights were reflecting off his dark skin.

“Wow, I’m talking a lot,” I told him.

He looked over at me.

“It’s cool.” His voice was so soft.

Who was this guy? So patient, so quiet, yet so in touch with the moment. I tried to imagine Elodie’s husband having a conversation with him. Phillip was buoyant and friendly and Kael … well, I didn’t know what the hell to think of him.

It had been a long time since I’d had this type of conversation with someone, if I ever had. My brother was the only person I reminisced about my parents with. But even he had stopped wanting to relive our childhood with me.

“My mom raised me and my sister up in Riverdale.” Kael’s voice was sudden and sharp, drowning out the purring engine, the sound of the wind.

“I love that show,” I told him and he smiled. I caught it before it vanished. I filed it away.

“It’s all right.”

“The show or the town?” I asked.

“Both.” He didn’t smile.

“How old is your sister?” I figured I’d better pounce while he was feeling uncharacteristically chatty.

“Younger than me.”

“My brother, too.” I wanted to ask him her exact age, but we were coming up to my little white house. “By about six minutes.”

Most people laughed when I told them this. Kael didn’t say anything but again, I knew he was looking at me.

The wind blew dirt over my windshield as I pulled into my driveway. Paving my driveway was rapidly moving up my to-do list. I parked and apologized again for fighting with my dad in front of him. He nodded, muttering his version of, “It’s cool.”

I reached between us to grab my purse from the floorboard behind my seat. “At least you won’t have to go through that again. As for me, I’ll be back there next Tuesday at seven p.m. sharp.” I said “sharp” as much as for myself as for Kael. If I was late for next week’s dinner, I would never hear the end of it.

The alley was so dark on moonless nights like this that it was hard to see the porch. A beam came from Kael’s phone and he shined it onto the porch.

“I need to get some lights out here.”

Kael’s body kept moving next to me and I saw him looking around the yard, down the driveway, down the alley to the side of the yard. His neck was sort of jerking. It wasn’t an alarming movement, just a quiet survey of his surroundings. I tried to imagine him in Afghanistan, a heavy gun strapped to his body and the weight of the free world on his shoulders.

“My sister is fifteen, by the way,” he said, as he walked past me into the house.

ELODIE WAS ASLEEP ON THE COUCH, her small body sprawled out at awkward angles. I sat my purse down on the floor, kicked my shoes off, and covered her with her favorite blanket. Her grandmother had made it for her when she was a kid. It was really worn now, almost threadbare, but she slept with it every day. Her grandma had passed a few years back; Elodie cried every time she talked about it.

I wondered if she missed her family. She was so far from them and pregnant, with a husband away at war. She didn’t talk about her parents much, but I got the impression they weren’t very keen on her running away to the U.S with a young soldier she’d met on the Internet.

I couldn’t say I blamed them. Elodie moved a little when I turned off the TV.

“Did you want to watch that?” I asked Kael. I forgot that he would be sleeping out here and considered waking Elodie up to come to my bed.

“No, it’s cool.”

Oh, this man of many words.

I continued, “Well, I’m going to put this pie in the fridge and go to bed. I have to work in the morning. And if you need anything from the store write it on my list stuck on the fridge,” I offered.

Kael nodded and sat down in my red chair. Was he going to sleep there?

“Do you need a blanket?” I asked.

He shrugged and said, “If you have one,” almost under his breath.

I grabbed an old comforter from the hallway closet and brought it to him. He thanked me and I told him goodnight again. I felt wide awake when I got to my bed. Through the night, I thought about how Kael had been with my dad and Estelle, how he somehow managed to make the dinner more bearable. I thought about the kind and unexpected way he filled up my gas tank on the way to my Dad’s and then, of course, because I overthink everything, I thought about how I should pay him back for the gas, even if he didn’t want me to.

I felt so restless. I turned over, grabbed a pillow, and put it between my legs, hugging it close. I thought about how it would be really nice to have a warm body in bed next to me. At least then I’d have someone to talk to when I couldn’t sleep. Unless it was Kael. I smiled at the thought, thinking how if it was him in my bed …

I caught myself before I went any further.

What the hell was wrong with me that I was picturing Kael in my bed? I needed physical contact, that had to be the reason that no matter how much I tried to think about anything else—anyone else—I couldn’t help but imagine him lying next to me, staring up at the ceiling the way he’d stared out the windshield the whole ride home.

It had been almost a year since I had human contact that wasn’t work related outside of my family and Elodie. Not that I was used to having it in large or consecutive doses, but Kae

l was making me daydream about him and I. People my age usually met guys at clubs or school or through friends, but I didn’t have much experience with any of the above.

Brien and I had gone back and forth a little, still making out in his car after I promised myself I would never speak to him again. The last time I let it happen was in his barracks room, when I rolled over and something jabbed my side.

An earring. I’d felt like I was in a movie because, one, who loses an earring while hooking up and doesn’t notice? And, two, I had been playing the part of the lonely, desperate-for-attention girl who knew her guy was hooking up with other girls, but it took a hideous hoop earring to make her admit it to herself.