Lost Stars by Lisa Selin Davis

Author:Lisa Selin Davis
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

The stairs creaked as I went up slowly to Soo’s room. I knew what I’d find in there, but still I knocked, lightly, then louder when I had no response.

“What?” Soo called, her voice laced with annoyance.

“It’s me,” I whispered.

She opened the door, naked but wrapped in her zebra-striped sheets—​this month’s décor included hot pink and animal print. “Time After Time,” saddest song ever, hummed in the background.

“What happened?” she asked. Her eyes and lips were puffy and red—​the combination, I assumed, of being wasted and fooling around.

I shook my head. “I don’t know. Nothing. It’s just—​I can’t go back there right now. I can’t go back.” I tried to hold in my tears. “Can I sleep here, please?”

Soo hesitated for a moment, looking behind her and then back to me. “Justin’s here,” she said, apologetically but firmly. She was good like that—​she knew how to be pretend-adult. It was probably why I’d attached myself to her, why, that week after the funeral, I’d ended up at Soo’s house night after night, just watching the way she moved, the way she took care of her mother and hosted the gang of shell-shocked teenagers. She’d taken me under her wing, almost literally: wrapped her arm around my shoulders the third night after the funeral and told me, “It’s okay, kid. You’ll get on the other side of it. We all will.”

We were sitting in the basement, which was done up ’60s style with macramé and beanbag chairs and beaded curtains back then, and everyone else was out attempting to illegally procure beer from Purdy’s Liquor. It was just me and Soo, and she’d said, again, “You’re going to be okay.”

But I’d shaken my head, back and forth, with such force that she couldn’t keep her arm around me, try as she might. I couldn’t stop, just shaking and shaking it as if that would ward off the tears, because I was terrified of the tears. If one leaked out, I’d cry forever. Finally, Soo grabbed my head in both her hands to stop me, and she stared hard at me. She wasn’t trying to soothe me or calm me. She’d gone into serious mode.

“Everybody misses her,” Soo had said. “We’re all scarred. We’re all going to be a mess together.”

Somehow that had stopped the shaking of my voice and my head, and I breathed slower and pulled my head back from Soo’s hands and looked at my lap. Then I screwed up enough courage to raise my head and look at Soo. She wasn’t like Greta, the red-blond goddess, glossy and model-beautiful. Everything about her was quieter, but stronger somehow, and I knew in that moment that I had an ally. She was scarred like me, but literally—​a mean snarl of scab lined her abdomen for two months afterward. Soo and Greta had both been in the car with Ginny. They’d forced themselves into it as Ginny peeled away. They’d walked away from the crash, almost unscathed. Almost.

She liked that scab, Soo had told me.

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