Where the Stars Still Shine(9)

“Democracy,” I offer.

“Exactly.” He points at me. “See? Callie understands.”

Phoebe laughs, then turns her smile toward me. “You shouldn’t encourage him.”

Greg winks as he unfolds himself from the floor. “Anyway, pastitsio”—he picks up Joe, who squawks at being parted from his LEGOs, and plops him in a high chair beside the dining-room table—“you’re going to love it.”

I take the empty seat beside Joe as Phoebe brings a steaming casserole dish from the kitchen. It’s been so long since I’ve eaten something that hasn’t come from a can, box, or drive-up window.

“So, I have a friend,” Greg says, as I scoop a small portion of pastitsio onto my plate. “He’s one of the guidance counselors at the high school, and he says that in order for you to attend, you’ll have to take some proficiency tests to determine your grade level.”

When I was about nine or ten, I was obsessed with school. I sought out books in which the characters attended school, I practiced cursive writing, I memorized the planets, and when Mom was at work, I’d spend hours playing school with imaginary students. I saw girls my age at the library and I would hover close, listening to the way they talked and wishing they were my friends. One girl, who had the palest eyelashes I’d ever seen and carried a sparkling unicorn notebook, called me “freak” for standing too close to her. Freak. Like she could see right inside me and knew about Frank. After that, I stopped wanting to go to school, because if the girl at the library could see my secret, everyone else would see it, too.

“I think you’ll enjoy Tarpon Springs High,” Greg continues. “I’m biased because I went there, but it’s a good school. Plus, it’s an easy way to make some friends and get involved in activities. Sports or music or whatever.”

I’ve gotten over wanting to be someone’s best friend, and I’ve managed to survive eleven years on a kindergarten education. I don’t want to go, but his face radiates such hope I can’t say it. I take a bite of food so I don’t have to answer.

He grins. “Good stuff, huh?”

I nod, because it’s every bit as delicious as he claimed, but swallowing it is all but impossible with a knot in my throat.

I can’t do this.

I can’t sit here and pretend I’m a normal girl when my whole life has been so fucked up. Greg and Phoebe haven’t slept in the backseat of their car, or eaten all their meals from a vending machine because their mothers forgot to buy groceries. And the only monsters Tucker and Joe will ever have to contend with are the imaginary kind that are banished in the light. These people are so clean, and I feel so—

—tainted.

The need to flee overtakes me. I push away from the table and beat a retreat through the kitchen, out to the trailer, where I dive beneath the comforter and hug Toot close to my chest. The owl smells dusty, as if it’s been waiting for me all this time. It’s comforting and heartbreaking at the same time.

“Callie?” Greg says my name softly through the screen but doesn’t come in. “You okay?”

I don’t answer, hoping he’ll go away.

“I’ve been warning myself that the real Callie might not be the same as the one I’ve been imagining all these years,” he says. “But that didn’t stop me from assuming you’d be excited about high school. Or that you’d automatically love Greek food. Or that you’d even want to be here. Anyway … I’m sorry.”

I wait a long time—well after I hear the back door slap shut—before I get out of bed and slip on my sneakers. My unpacked suitcase is sitting beside the door, my guitar still in its case. I think about taking them and leaving, but the little bit of money I have will get me exactly nowhere.





The neighborhood is still, and the way the trees drip with Spanish moss is a little eerie. I move from patch of streetlight to patch of streetlight, unsure of where I’m headed—and try not to think about my mom. At the corner, Ada Street becomes Hope Street and continues on. It seems a good omen—hope—so I keep walking. The residential neighborhood gives way to businesses, and Hope makes its perpendicular end at Dodecanese, a boulevard lined with shops. The gift-shop windows are filled with sponges, soaps, shells, and Greek-themed tourist wear; the bakeries scented of yeast and honey; and the restaurants called Mykonos and Hellas.

Almost everything is closed, but the plucky mandolin music from a couple of open restaurants follows me, the melodies melting one into the next. My skin is stained blue in the neon glow of the gift shops, and I feel as if I’m an alien in yet another new world. I pause on the sidewalk and close my eyes. Maybe if I stand here long enough I will remember how to be Greek and I’ll feel as if I belong in Tarpon Springs. Except none of this is familiar and it is not my home. I look around as if my surroundings might have changed while my eyes were shut, but it’s still the same, still strange. So I cross the street.

On the opposite side of Dodecanese there is a riverfront esplanade lined with rows of fishing boats, their decks heaped with dark mounds of something I can’t identify. It isn’t until I reach a boat illuminated by a caged utility light hanging from the deck roof that I realize they’re sponges.

Standing beneath the light, a guy around my age—no, probably a little older—strings the dark-yellow tufts on a cord like an oversize version of the popcorn garlands Mom and I used to make at Christmas. He has a blue bandanna tied around his dirty-blond curls, and when he bends down for another sponge, there’s a sweat-stained spot on his gray shirt where it sticks between his shoulder blades. He glances up, and his face is something so fine and beautiful, it makes my chest ache the way it does when I hear a sad song or finish a favorite book.