Stardust

The Star and the Aurora

    Back on the nightstand, my cell phone vibrated with a vigor to send it reeling from the table if I hadn't dove over my bed to catch it. Mid-air during the great leap over my four-poster, I hoped it was Skylar calling from a payphone somewhere — he himself was without a phone, but found great amusement in calling me from "secret locations" at payphones, often joking about giving me clues to the whereabouts of the payphone and taping his next location beneath the phone. Never had any of my hopes been more ill-founded. Matt's name repeatedly flashed across the screen. I struggled to hold back a sigh when I answered the call; instead, the drawl manifested into a eye-roll that, thankfully, Matt could not see. Just answering the call took a good ten-seconds of deliberation in itself of whether or not I really wanted to talk to him when, just last night, he acted particularly snotty when I called to ask if he'd seen Skylar. Apparently, Matt was in the middle of a movie date with Rob and I was inconveniencing them.

    " 'Bout time you answered your phone, Jacoby," Matt said, his tone rather pointed.

    That time, I did sigh. Adamantly. "Well, excuse the hell out of me, Mother."

    "Sorry," he spoke lowly, so lowly that I imagined his voice getting lost amongst the world's other conversations in the telephone lines. "It's just that... I have some pretty bad news."

    At first, I thought it would be some melodrama about another Brennyn and Leah squabble or Shannyn and her revolving door of boy problems — namely the Mike and Andrea Álvarez ordeal. Then I stifled a chuckle at the thought of him telling me something absolutely ridiculous, like Santa announcing that Christmas had been canceled at my house this year because my parents are whores (I used the term lovingly ... sort of). But then I remembered that Skylar, not Matt, would make a joke like that, and, for whatever reason, that notion seemed to have made the chuckle more potent.

    Unfortunately, I would soon learn that the "bad news" in question was none of the above — no matter how much I would trade the real bad news for the high school, histrionic "bad news" — and that if I thought Skylar's life was up-in-the-air before, then, Jesus, after the phone call from Matt, Skylar was practically orbiting Neptune.

    Of all the things that could have happened in the world, with all of its six billion people and all of its billions of happenings, it had to happen to Jackie. In a strange way, I started to wonder about why things had to be the way they were. Like why Jackie had to be Skylar's mother. And why, after all the years Jackie spent burning her lungs with pity in pipes and ruining her heart by selling her "love" for grams, it had to happen to her now. Why now did she have to snort or smoke or inject too much? Why, after spending most of her life in an intoxicated stupor, did it have to kill her now? And why did it have to be Skylar suffering the most from her irresponsibility?

    Matt's words sliced through my skin like the papercuts of Jackie's obituary. He said it just like he read it from the Sunday paper; as stagnant as the words printed across its pages. "Jackie Glass, 36, died of a drug overdose on December the 22nd..."

    I didn't hear much more after that because it was then that I wondered about why it had to be Jackie, and why it had to be Skylar, and why it had to be now. The fragments of what I did hear amongst all of the chaos in my head was that Skylar was in a foster home at 3713 Pictor Drive, in the opposite direction of the trailer park. I knew where that was. Only because my paternal grandparents lived on 5th Street, two blocks over from Pictor, before they retired, packed their crap, and moved to a beach house in Hawaii, never to contact their "favorite" grandchildren again, save for the far-and-few-between postcards they sent around the New Year. But they —  and their crappy postcards — were the least of my concerns.