Stardust: The Star and the Aurora
Jake Gallagher
I woke up sixteen minutes passed seven in the morning. I only awoke that early on school days or in the event that my mother had guests and recruited me to be her errand boy: Jake, do this; Jake, do that; Jake, stop looking so suicidal when I ask for your help. The latter she voiced quite often lately, but it wasn't my fault that "suicide" just so happened to be my natural facial expression.
It being Christmas, I could sleep until January if I wanted to, but between the boisterous Christmas-party preparations of my family downstairs and the separation anxiety of not seeing or talking to Skylar for three whole days, my psychological clockwork was about as fine-tuned as my mother's car these days, which really wasn't fine-tuned at all — it was currently a lifeless corpse in the driveway. Old Blue's cause of death was unknown to myself seeing as how I floundered at anything that even remotely required being mechanically inclined.
Last night, after pacing my bedroom for four hours calling everyone that might have known where Skylar was and driving myself into an anxious madness that boiled in my loins and slithered up my spine like an acidic snake, I went to sleep at a godawful 4:15, but not before contemplating walking across town to see if Skylar was in the field or the trailer park. I didn't like the silence between us. I felt his absence like the moon without its changing phases. With how up-in-the-air Skylar's life seemed to be, it scared me not to hear from him.
Despite just three measly hours of rest, it was pleasant. Brief, but pleasant, for I dreamed of a beautiful guy with stars in his eyes and a smirk aglow with the orange radiance of a cigarette. How I wished for a continuation of that dream when I dragged myself out of the warmth of my bed at 7:18, feeling significantly more cold and tired than I had at 7:16. I brushed my teeth as Jolly drank from the faucet — missing him by a very narrow margin when I spit out the toothpaste — and pulled myself into a pair of jeans and the dark hoodie Skylar left at my house the last time he slept over, seemingly a lifetime ago. It still smelled of him. Like cigarettes, which I had come to appreciate the scent of, Old Spice and the "shower fresh" scent of deodorant. I didn't want to ruin his smell; I put on the faintest layer of deodorant and left the prismatic bottle of cologne my father bought me ages ago at the bottom of the basket beside the sink.
Not even the slightest ounce of my willingness wanted to go downstairs where I knew my father — who I would refer to as John in the face of my family to keep up appearances — lurked amongst the ornaments and garland and holiday spice potpourri. Hell, I didn't even want to stick around for the gift openings or my extended family's arrivals. I just wanted to get to the front door as swiftly as possible — which wouldn't be very swift considering how the creaky staircase seemed to break the sound barrier when I wanted to go unnoticed — and start the long walk across town in search of Skylar. Not only was I curious to know where he'd been for the last three days, but I wanted to give him the Christmas present I had been anxiously harboring — more like burning holes in my hands whenever I touched its little, bowed box — since the week before Secret Santa. It wasn't anything too extravagant, but I knew he'd appreciate it. It was a necklace; a silver, five-pointed star on a long, thin chain. I stumbled upon it at the mall the day I bought Brennyn's belt, and I knew I had to get it for him. I had never been particularly enthusiastic about buying anything before, let alone jewelry, but I was just as excited — with a touch of vomit-inducing nervousness — as a man buying an engagement ring.
I walked into my already laced shoes as Jolly wound his tail around my ankles. I grabbed the palm-sized black box blooming with a white bow from my nightstand. It felt as hot as lava coursing through the veins in my hand. I shoved it in the pocket of Skylar's hoodie, and I thought I would leave it in there when I gave him the hoodie and he would be surprised when he happened upon it when he habitually shoved his hands in his pockets. Satisfied with the plan, I took a step for my bedroom door.
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.
Matt's voice still rumbled with the monotony of the words of the newspaper. I didn't care to hear the rest, and I didn't care as I hung up the phone without so much as a "goodbye" or a "screw you." The only thing I cared about was getting to Skylar.
I raced down the stairs — who presumably screeched with a loudness to drown out the Christmas music playing in all of the world, but I was too panicked to notice. The pocketed box slapped against my stomach with every frantic step I took. I was less than a foot from the front door when I heard my mother's voice shout my name from the living room. Her tone was coated with the annoyance it usually had when she had to call my name more than once. Maybe she had, but that was something else that I didn't care to notice.
"I have to go!" I hollered from the doorway, my shaking fingers just centimeters from the doorknob.
"No you don't!" she shouted back. "We're having a family meeting!"
We hadn't had one of those since Mom and John sat us down to inform us of their separation. So, of course, their was the stigma that every "family meeting" was the harbinger of bad news, and I didn't think I could handle anymore bad news at the moment.
"It's really important!" I stomped into the living room, hoping that my expression was panic-stricken enough for her to let me go. "This is a literal life or death situation; not like the time I had to leave in the middle of dinner because I accidentally left my textbooks at the library! This is SERIOUS!"
Mom and John stood before the Christmas tree. If they hadn't been having an affair — and if I didn't think they were the devil because of it — they would almost look ethereal with the lights of the tree glowing against their backs and radiating over their shoulders. But they were having an affair, and I did think they were devils from the pits of hell, and so I felt a pinch of sympathy for the angel ornament staring down at the both of them from the top of the tree. Her cherub face looked saddened, and her hands were pressed together with a candle in between. It was almost like she was praying for them... Oh, did they need it.
"Mom says this is serious too," Levi said, sitting cross-legged on the couch with Cassie in his lap and Owen beside him.
I was sure my eyes could burn holes into my parents' faces. "Well, Mom is a hypochondriac, so everything is serious to her."
"I am not," Mom grimaced and pointed a dainty finger at the empty space on the couch, "so you sit your butt down, Jacoby."
I took a deep breath. Otherwise, I would have exploded into a billion bloody chunks all over the Christmas tree. I spoke as calmly as I possibly could, given the circumstances, "Mother, I love you, I really do... but what about the words 'important' and 'serious' do you not understand?"
John's face hardened into a scowl that etched deep lines beside his lips and eyes. He looked like one really pissed off bulldog. Or a Sharpei with a bad taste in its mouth. Either way, I felt an indescribable tremor in my bones. "Take a seat, Jacoby, or me and you will have to take a walk."
The grammar fanatic that lived in the perfectly organized, library-like corner of my mind that I hardly used for anything besides literature class couldn't help but mutter, "Actually, it's 'you and I will have to take a walk'."
His fists clenched.
I didn't really know what he meant by "take a walk," but I heard that line in a movie once and then someone got beat up, so I shut my mouth and sat immediately.
It took me a grand total of two seconds to notice that Mom and John's fingers were intertwined. I got the violent urge to vomit, but I wasn't sure if it was because of them or the anxiousness of getting to Skylar. A part of me wanted to really give them a piece of my mind — which had become accustomed to not being so shy since I first discovered Mom and John's affair on Thanksgiving — but the other part of me, the largest quantity of who I was, just wanted to tear out of the living room like a tornado personified and not stop until I was standing on Pictor Drive, outside of the foster home that kept Skylar confined in its foreign walls.
"We have an announcement to make, and I'm sure the majority of you will consider it great news," Mom beamed, the smile in her eyes faltering on me for the briefest moment, as if to say, You're the minority that won't think this is great news, but I'm gonna say it anyway.
Mom leaned her head against John's collarbone. He stroked her hair like he used to when I was a kid.
I frowned, and stared at a branch on the tree directly over their heads. I was too amassed with disgust to look at their display of affection any longer.
"I have decided to have my marriage to Anessa annulled," John said. "After the process is finalized, I plan on marrying your mother, who was meant to be my wife all along."
Owen and Levi hollered and cheered beside me. Cassie, who hadn't understood a word of that, acted on pure instinct when she laughed, kicking her feet around like she did when someone tickled her stomach.
I looked at John and Nora so quickly that I thought my eyes came loose and started rattling around in my skull. For a second, I couldn't possibly believe that I heard them correctly. But, then again, I couldn't put anything passed them anymore. Not only was I angry and disgusted, but I was absolutely ashamed of them. Getting a marriage annulled is worse than getting a divorce. At least a divorce is a documented validity of the marriage; it's like a stone engraving of your once overwhelming love for the person you married. But an annulment is an erasing of every chapter of life you spent with that person, like your relationship and all the time and emotion invested into it never existed at all. I would rather have it documented that my relationship ended than to have it deleted from history, even if I grew to loathe the person I married because, at one time in my life, I was deeply, devotedly in love with that person, and I would never regret that. Maybe John wasn't in love with Anessa — maybe she was always just a place holder for Mom — but I'm sure that her feelings for John were real, and getting an annulment wasn't fair to her. It wasn't fair at all, but John didn't seem to care about that. And neither did Mom. They were both more selfish than I ever thought they could be.
I couldn't stand being in the same room as them — any of them — any longer. I got up with a rigidness in my bones that felt as cold as ice, and I started towards the front door with what felt like the weight of a glacier on my spine. It wasn't until I reached the door that my mother came dashing after me.
"Jake," she cooed, putting a hand on my shoulder, "where are you going?"
Tears pricked my eyes. I couldn't find it within myself to yell anymore. All I had left, out of all the attitude and defiance I displayed for the last month since Thanksgiving, was a whisper. Yes, I was angry at them, but I was mostly upset with the fact that their selfishness hindered me from being with the person that needed someone selfless, and that person was Skylar. Their conceit and their carelessness towards everyone else was what stood between me and Skylar, and if it weren't for them, I could've been halfway on my way to him.
"Contrary to you and John who don't seem to care about anyone, I'm gonna go be there for a friend... because I do care about people," I said.
Nora's eyes glazed over with a pained wetness, but that didn't stop me. I turned on my heels, dashing down the porch steps. I did spare her a glance over my shoulder, which only found that her thin fingers still hovered in the place my shoulder once was. It looked like she was consoling a ghost. And maybe she was; after I crossed the threshold of that door, I didn't really feel like I had been in that house before, let alone lived there. I hardly felt like myself around them; the guy that called his parents whores and made their lives miserable — no matter how morally wrong they were — wasn't truly the person I was or would ever want to be. I allowed their transgressions to turn me into someone that I would never be proud of, someone who did and said shameful things to his own parents, and because of that I couldn't help but feel like I owed them an apology. However, in the same token, they owed me an apology for making me vulnerable to their wrongdoing, but I knew that was an apology that would never see the light of day.
For a moment, as the worn soles of my shoes slapped against the pavement in a full sprint through lawns and traffic lights and civilization that passed by in a gray blur, I wished I could go back to the person I was before John and Nora's affair, before Matt kissed me, before the twins and Leah and Ethan and all of the drama they brought with them... before Skylar. But I would never regret any part of Skylar's existence in my life; I just wished I was still the same shy, good-natured, and slightly off-kilter guy he met that day on the bleachers of the high school. I think he liked that version of me better. More importantly, I think I liked that version of me better. I hoped that, somewhere inside all of the compartments of my conscious, that old version of me was still stored away, like baby teeth or old photo albums, just waiting for me to shake the cobwebs and the dust from his foundered skeleton.
Before I knew it, I was standing on Pictor Drive — where the trees on either side of the street reached up into an infinitely-long canopy of green over the thin, newly-paved street — before a skinny, two-story, red house in a row of variously-colored identicals. This house's mailbox had been painted with fancy script in the shape of 3713. It was nice and quaint, but I could never see Skylar happy in a place like that. Not when his childhood was the way it was, and not when the only person who understood every facet of him just died. There was no way, especially now, that Skylar could consider a structured, routine environment that was almost entirely dependent on normalcy, his home. It was like putting an animal, who spent its entire life free amongst the wilderness, in a doghouse. It's just not meant to be that way.
Sitting there on the middle stair of the porch where he grinded something into the pavement beneath his old Converses, was Skylar. I wasn't sure if I expected him to or not, but he looked the same. His hair was still wild and uncombed, though, inexplicably befitting to him. He was wearing the shirt with Kurt Cobain's portrait printed across its front. He had that tired look on his face that he always had when sitting through any class that wasn't astronomy, only it looked a pinch more weary. But as I stood in the vision of those copper irises that reminded me of old photographs, I realized that he did look different. It wasn't his hair, or his face, or those irises, or that upward tilt in the left corner of his mouth. It was just something in the way he carried himself; in the way he moved and the way he breathed. And it was like all the air around him was different, too. It wasn't necessarily a bad thing. It was just... different. I couldn't explain it as we stared at each other from opposite ends of the freshly-mowed lawn, and I couldn't even after that.
"My first visitor," he said, his eyes still boring into mine as he spread his arms out before him, like a host presenting some immaculate entertainment. "Welcome to Casa de Conner."
"Conner?" I asked, taking a tentative step toward him.
"Yeah... Doug and Louise Conner. They couldn't have kids of their own, so they take in a shit-ton of foster kids. I'm the fifth kid they have right now, and they're talkin' to a social worker about bringin' in another one."
I took another step toward him. "This house looks pretty small for seven people."
"Yeah," he said again, "but it's like an optical illusion. The bedrooms are bigger than they look from the outside."
I nodded. I didn't know what to say. There were so many things running rampant through all the compartments in my head-space: Should I bring up Jackie, or should I wait for him to bring her up? Why didn't he tell anyone about what happened? Why did we have to find out from the obituary of the newspaper? What's going to happen to him now? Are the Conners a permanent thing, or is this just a layover between stations? Why is he squashing his cigarettes into the pavement?
It took a moment for the forefront of my mind to latch on to the latter of those thoughts. I hadn't consciously realized that it was flakes of tobacco and rolling paper that were scattered across the walkway before being lifted up and away by the breeze. Although it seemed like the most trivial of the questions, I asked, "Why are you crushing your cigarettes?"
He took another cigarette from his pocket and dropped it into the remnants of the others before his heel grated it into non-existence. "I don't smoke anymore."
"Since when?"
"Since yesterday," he looked as if he was smirking a little, though, I couldn't tell if it was him or just the natural tilt of his lips. "I'm gettin' rid of the last of my stash."
He called me over to him with a flick of his wrist. I all but died at the chance to sit beside him again. I missed being that close to him. He still smelled like Old Spice, "shower fresh" deodorant, and cigarettes, but the latter was probably from the flakes of tobacco beneath his shoe.
His shoulder grazed mine, and I remembered the last time we sat that close. It was on Jackie's old porch just before I kissed him. I conjured up all the courage that I had that night to mention the large, obnoxious elephant in the room; "I'm sorry about Jackie... I know 'I'm sorry' is the generic, Hallmark thing to say, and I'd love to say something better, but I'm not so eloquent these days."
He did smirk this time, and I knew for sure that it wasn't just that slightly tilted mouth of his. "You've never been eloquent."
I wanted to recognize and enjoy the humor of that statement, but I couldn't. All of my compartments were still so full of him, and all of these questions about him and the events of the last three days that I've been without him. I was unable to muster a small smile, let alone a laugh.
"Why didn't you tell anyone, Sky?" I asked, on the verge of pleading and crying. "Why did Matt have to call me after seeing her obituary in the newspaper?"
He stared out at the silent, tree-laden street with an expression that was nothing but a blank canvas. After awhile, he muttered, "'Cause I've been too busy thinkin' about what the fuck I'm gonna do with my life."
"So 'Casa de Conner' isn't permanent?"
"No," he sighed. "I mean, they're really nice. They like me and I like them, and they were thinking about taking me permanently, but the whole situation got real fucked up yesterday."
"In what way?"
"Well, apparently," he paused for a breath, but some vague thought of mine assumed he paused for dramatic effect just to rattle the cage of my anxieties, "my mom had my father's name written down on some old medical forms she filled out right after I was born. My social worker, Tina, ended up finding him and calling him, and... he wants to meet me. He owns a company about fifty miles from here, so he could be comin' any day now."
"Really?! That's great!"
And I really did think it was great. I had never been more excited for anything than I was for Skylar having a family member willing and capable of caring for him; hell, the news of Skylar's father even surpassed the excitement I felt the time that my maternal grandparents took me to Disneyland when I was six. Skylar had never meet his father, and I thought this would be the perfect opportunity for him to get to know the side of his family that he had never known. Then I started hoping that this guy, whoever he could be, was a good person, because I believed that Skylar deserved the best of everything. I was so excited that I didn't even notice the look of disappointed etched so deeply onto Skylar's face until he said, "Actually, it's the exact opposite of great."
"What?" I said, nearly tumbling face-first off of the step and into the pile of tobacco flakes on the pavement. "This could be really good for you, Sky. You can finally get the father you deserve."
He shook his head disagreeably. "I don't want a dad."
"Why?" At that point, I was so dumbfounded that I could burst into chorus of a million question marks.
"Because my dad never wanted me," he said, almost completely devoid of any emotion. His voice sounded as if it were its own, separate entity disconnected from the rest of him. "I was the product of a one-night stand. When Jackie found out she was pregnant with me, she had to go on a manhunt just to find this dude. After a month of searching, she did find him, but when she told him about the pregnancy, he said he didn't want kids and he sure as hell didn't want my mom, so he offered to pay for an abortion. My mom refused to terminate me, so he wrote her a check and told her to never contact him... She agreed. But, to make matters worse, the check bounced, leaving my mom, who was still practically a kid herself, stuck with a baby and no help from anyone except my grandparents who ended up dyin' when I was three."
All the excitement and the hope I felt before was like a window spreading with spiderweb-like cracks as he spoke, until the whole thing shattered into a billion fragments of dust by the time he finished talking.
He started toying with his hands as if he needed something to preoccupy his mind... like one of the cigarettes stomped into the pavement. "I wanna give him the benefit of the doubt 'cause he was just as young as my mom at the time she got pregnant. No one is ready to be a parent after just barely graduating high school, but I can't shake the feeling that me and him together would be a disaster."
"Why?"
"'Cause he told my mom he didn't ever want kids, but now he's married and has a son a few years younger than me that has a trust fund and goes to an expensive private school," he scoffed. "I could never fit in there, surrounded by people who only care about material shit, like how many cars and condominiums their next business deal will buy them... That's not me at all. As stupid as it might sound, I like not having a whole lot 'cause at least I can appreciate the things and the people I do have."
"Well, if you're not gonna go with your dad, and Casa de Conner isn't permanent, then... what's gonna happen to you?" I muttered. I could feel tears welling up, threatening to spill over the brim of my bottom eyelashes. I felt the tears' sting all over my body, like tiny knives carving into my flesh.
No matter how much I tried to recede into Skylar's hoodie, I couldn't escape his eyes. He placed one of his large, warm hands on top of mine, and I burst into hysterical sobs because I knew. Without him even saying anything, just by the look in those copper irises, I knew.
"I think I wanna get outta this city," he said. "I've been thinking about it ever since my mom died."
That was the one thing I never wanted to hear him say. I would even be okay with him saying he hated me if that meant that I still got to see him at school every day as we passed each other in the hall or shared a glance in astronomy. The thought of him leaving and never being this close to him again terrified me. I didn't think I would ever invest all of myself into one person, but I did, and I honestly wouldn't know what to do with myself if he ever left. It sounded pathetic, but I didn't care. I was in love with him and I always would be; no amount of distance could change that, but I needed more than just the thought or memory of him. I needed him next to me, the warmth of his hand on mine and the scent of Old Spice lingering faintly beneath my nose. I could barely survive three days without him; anymore than that could be liable to kill me.
He exhaled one of those long, emotionally exasperated sighs. "I love my mom with everything I have in me, but over the years she became this huge black hole of vacancy and hopelessness. I can feel myself becoming that too, and I don't want to be like her. She overdosed because she couldn't live with herself anymore, and I'm not gonna be like that. I'm gonna do whatever it takes to fill up this vacancy I have, no matter what... but I can't do it here. I can't do it in a place that's a constant reminder of how my mom gave up. And I can't do it in a place where, around every corner, I know at least one person who can sell me a few grams of the temporary happiness that my mom tried to live on. In the end, she let it kill her... I promised myself that that's not gonna happen to me."
"Why can't you just get help? Go to a therapist or rehab?" I pleaded.
"I've seen more therapists in the last three days than most people would like to see in their entire lifetimes, and not a damn one of 'em helped me."
I was reaching the end of my bargaining chips, but if I was anything at all, I was persistent. "Well, if you don't want to be like your mom, then just resist the temptation to do drugs. Just... stay away from the places where you know dealers are."
He gave me a pitiful smile. "It's not that easy, Jake. It's not easy for me to deal with all of the things that normal people deal with, so I do the drugs just so I don't have to worry about any of the things that are constantly racing through my head when I'm sober. I do drugs just so I can be out of my mind for a little while, and that feeling is more addicting than the drugs."
I was an absolute sobbing, snotty mess. I couldn't control my voice or my breathing anymore, and I was sure that people ten blocks away could hear me shouting.
"Well, where are you gonna go, Skylar?! To Timbuktu?! And how are you gonna get there?!"
He looked at me with that same pitying smile. "I found a few hundred dollars stashed in my mom's mattress when I went back to the trailer to get my clothes and shit. I bought a train ticket to Michigan. I got friends there, so I'll stay with them for awhile until I figure where I want to go from there."
I had nothing left to say and nothing left to give. He had it all planned out like it would be the easiest thing in the world for him to cut ties with Cetus, California and all the people in it, and that broke my heart beyond repair. It wouldn't be easy for me, as told by the pain in my chest that felt like a ton of bricks hit me and the non-stop tears streaming down my face like someone broke the floodgates inside my head. And it wouldn't be easy for Matt, or Brennyn, or Shannyn, or Ethan, or Mr. Oleander, or Leah especially. The selfish part of me wanted to believe that he was being selfish, but I knew he wasn't. I knew he would stay if he could, but the fact of the matter was that he couldn't, and I just had to come to terms with that. If I didn't want him to end up like his mother, which I didn't, then I had to accept that he was leaving and I couldn't hold him back from doing that no matter how much I wanted to.
Skylar wrapped his arms around me, pulling my head into his chest. There, I clung to the peeling face of Kurt Cobain on that ratty old T-shirt of his, and I relished in that this would be one of the last times I would be with him just like this.
"The train leaves tomorrow night," he whispered into my hair. "I'm gonna miss you. A lot. More than anyone else. And as corny as this is gonna sound... if you were anything in the entire universe, you'd be as important as the northern star."
My mouth opened before I could process what it was going to unleash. "I love you."
He smiled so wide that I could feel it in my bones, and I could see it everywhere across the atmosphere. Despite my disposition, that was the best thing I'd ever felt and the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen.
"I know," he whispered.
I didn't think I could part with his hoodie knowing that he was leaving for good, but I pulled out the little black box whose bow was slightly flattened from laying in the hoodie's pocket. When Skylar opened it, that smile of his burned through every atom of him like a string of Christmas lights. He hung the five-pointed star around his neck, and I knew from that moment on that he would never take it off.
"Merry Christmas, Skylar," I smiled.
Later that night, after Skylar convinced me to make amends with my parents — who hugged me for a long time and cried as they told me how sorry they were, and I cried too because I hadn't realized before how nice it felt to have my parents hug me at the same time like they did in my childhood, — I thought back to Skylar and the strangeness and unfamiliarity of the foster home. It was then, colored red by the Christmas lights radiating from the tree, that I decided I didn't want to remember the Skylar sitting next to me on Jackie's new porch the night we went back for his cigarettes, or the Skylar at the foster home with a bus ticket and a heart set on escaping the vacancy that overwhelmed him in California. I wanted to remember Skylar Glass how I fell in love with him. The Skylar Glass who scaled down the side of our high school from the second floor just to avoid going to algebra. The Skylar Glass who quoted Jack London's, "I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet." The Skylar Glass who laid on my bedroom floor contemplating how people's faces tended to define who they are. The Skylar Glass who would always take people as they were, no matter how flawed or inconstant they could be. My Skylar Glass who showed me the wonderful stardust he spent so many accumulated hours admiring from the dewy grass of the field. I didn't know then why he loved that stardust so much, and I probably would never really know why, but I liked to think that it had something to do with the beautiful ink unraveling into convolutedly intricate cursive down his arm; the ink whose every word and letter was the meaning of everything Skylar was:
His head is made of stars, but not yet arranged into constellations.
☆ ☪ ☆