Girl Who Read the Stars Read online

  “Okay,” I say slowly. “Yeah. I’ll meditate with you.” I close my eyes.

  “Are you cheating?” he asks good-naturedly.

  “No,” I say immediately. “Are you?”

  “Uh-uh.”

  I squint one eye open to see. His eyes are closed. Feeling a little better, I close my eye again and say, “Okay. Take a nice deep breath and hold it. And then, when you exhale, empty your lungs all the way, all the way out. Every last drop of oxygen, squeeze it out of you. Better to start with lungs full of fresh, new air.”

  We are silent for a moment, letting the air move in and then out of our lungs.

  “Now,” I say, “on your next inhale, pull the air in deep. Start by expanding your stomach and then filling the air all the way to the very tips of your lungs. Hold it, and then let it all out slowly.”

  I can hear Trow following my directions. I’ve never done breathing exercises with just one person before. Well, outside of my mom. And one person who is sitting so close to me. I feel hyperaware of the rhythm of the oxygen moving in and out of his body, keeping him alive and slowing him down all at once. I am so aware of Trow’s rhythm that I am having a hard time finding my own, making the air fill me up and go out as easily as I normally do. I end up trying to match my rhythm to his, just to try to force my frantic heartbeat to calm down.

  “Again,” I say, making my voice even softer, following his breathing across from me. “And again. Keep doing it, breathing this way, and clear your mind. Wipe it clean. Think of nothing but your breathing. Focus on it. Focus on the air as you draw it down into you and as you release it from you. In…and out. In…and out. If you have a thought, it’s okay. Recognize that it is a thought, and then push it to the side, and then focus again on your breathing. In…and out. In…and out.” I am practically whispering by this time. Clearing your mind is always so much easier said than done. I am normally very good at it, but right now I am hyperaware that my mind is filled right to the brim, and what it’s filled with is Trow. I feel like I can feel him next to me, even though we’re not touching. I feel like if we kept doing this, this breathing next to each other, I could almost climb into his head, like we could just be one together.

  When the bell rings, signaling the end of lunch, it startles me harshly, interrupting my rhythm. I open my eyes and don’t look at Trow immediately, because I don’t feel like I can. Instead, I blink around the classroom, getting used to the level of light. The hallways start filling with noise, and any minute now, this classroom will be invaded by other people, and this whole spell will be broken.

  I look at Trow. I don’t know what I want to say, but I know I want to be able to stop time. I wish I had the magic power to stop time.

  Trow has a strange look on his face. I can’t read it. “That was…” he says.

  I don’t know what the end of that sentence is going to be. And I want to know so badly.

  But Trow just says, “Thanks,” and stands up as the next class starts to spill in all around us.

  • • •

  The next day in homeroom, I have a plan. A better plan than Operation Trow has turned out to be so far. A plan with actual steps. I made myself come up with it the night before and, let me tell you, it was super hard work and I am very pleased with myself. I get to homeroom ready to implement my new plan like I am a military tactician, Napoleon or Julius Caesar or whoever was really good at battles.

  But Trow’s not here.

  He’s so frustrating, not doing exactly what I want!

  That night, I decide I want to read my stars. Reading my stars is such a habit with me. I think I used to do it the way other kids used to suck their thumbs, but then they all grew up and grew out of it, but my habit wasn’t visible to other people and so I never did. But reading the stars fulfills the same mindless comfort that I think thumb-sucking must do to babies, and most of the time I think it’s just as pointless. I do it because it’s familiar, and because I can’t quite kill the hope that one day I will look at them and actually see what Mom seems to think I should see. That I will look at them and there, written in the stars, will be my future. You will do great things. You will have great loves. You will be happy. But instead I look at the stars and all I get from them, if I’m lucky, are general feelings. Vague unrest there, something exciting happening here. It’s like reading fortunes in a fortune cookie or something. And they’ve just been a mess lately, like my stars can’t make up their minds about anything.

  And still I keep reading them, compulsively, hoping for the day when my stars stop being as scatterbrained as I feel and provide some actual help about what I ought to do with my life.

  I shove open my bedroom window and my screen, and climb half out, perching on the windowsill. Mother hates it when I do this, but she’s never been able to get us to stop it, me or Mom.

  I sit there and tip my head back and look up at the stars over my head. Here’s the secret about stars that a lot of people don’t bother to pay attention to, I guess: if you narrow your eyes and look through your eyelashes, the stars swirl into clouds, into the Milky Way, and they dance over your head, and in that dance can be a message. I don’t always read my stars this way. Sometimes I just chart an astrology chart, or I flip the tarot cards, or I scatter the salt and pepper, or I peer into the dancing dust motes. Mom’s taught me innumerable things around me to “read,” even though I think mostly we’re just imagining all of it. But the thing I love most is this: I love to make the stars dance. And I love to see if they have anything to say.

  Tonight the stars are the same stubborn mess they have been for a while. They dance over my head, through my eyelashes, but I can’t feel anything from them. And definitely nothing about Trow. Trow feels to me like he is not the stars: he is the dark of the night sky between them.

  Trow’s in school the next day, and I don’t give myself time to think myself out of it. I launch myself into the plan he delayed with his absence the day before.

  “So,” I announce.

  He turns in his chair and smiles at me. He looks tired, but then he always looks tired, and that never diminishes the power of his smile on me. “What’s up?” he asks.

  “You should come to my yoga class.” Yes, I think. Good job. Super straightforward and hopefully charming as a result. Nailed it. Definitely.

  He regards me for a moment. Then he lifts an eyebrow in evident confusion and says, “Is that a euphemism for something…?”

  I feel myself blush hotly. “No! It’s a…not-euphemism. A real thing. I teach a yoga class. Not really meditation, but, you know, you might like it.”

  “You teach a yoga class,” he repeats, as if he can’t get his head around this.

  “Yeah. My mom owns a yoga studio.”

  He glances at my rainbow hair and his smile quirks at me again. “I shouldn’t be surprised about that, should I?”

  “So you should come.”

  He hesitates. “Yoga…isn’t really my thing.”

  “Have you ever tried it?”

  “No,” he admits slowly.

  “Then how do you know? You liked the meditation,” I remind him and then wonder, Did he like the meditation? I guess we never really talked about it. I just assumed. Maybe I’m being too pushy. Maybe I shouldn’t have said anything. Maybe I am the world’s worst military tactician. Maybe I’m the anti-Napoleon. Maybe I should order some kind of retreat. “I mean,” I correct myself, “did you like the meditation? I thought you liked the meditation—”

  “It was fine, it was… Thanks for the invitation.”

  I can tell when I’m being politely brushed off, and it stings. It stings more than it should. It’s not like my life is riding on whether or not this boy comes to my yoga class. This is not actually military tactics. He’s just a boy and it’s just a yoga class.

  But I feel irrational when it comes to Trow. And I feel annoyed by that. M
other always says that I am composed of yin and yang, warring together. There is all of her practical pragmatism warring with Mom’s star-gazing intuition. I came from only one of them, but they are both raising me, and I cannot help that they seem to both sit inside my heart, frowning at every choice I make for being too risky or not risky enough. I have acted a lot like Mom when it comes to Trow; maybe it’s time to act like Mother.

  Objectively speaking, he is just a cute boy who sits in front of me in homeroom, and I am being ridiculous.

  CHAPTER 5

  I sit in my room and turn over tarot cards, and nothing makes any sense. I don’t get why everything I try to read these days is like this. It’s like someone splashed water all over the later pages of a novel and now I’m trying to piece together blurred letters or something. In my tarot cards, the Magician keeps showing up, and the High Priestess, and the Wheel of Fortune. Sometimes the Empress is there, and sometimes the Hierophant, and sometimes the Chariot. Sometimes Strength, and sometimes the Hermit, and sometimes the Moon. Sometimes Judgment, and sometimes the World. The Hanged Man shows up with a frequency I don’t like, and Death, and the Tower. But never the Lovers. In fact, it seems like the Lovers is the only card that never shows up, no matter how many times I shuffle the deck.

  I know better than to believe that cards tell us the future. Nothing tells us the future. Nothing on this world, Mom likes to say. But the cards can give you a feeling, like the stars on a good night. These cards aren’t giving me any feelings though. These cards are all over the place. These cards are just a mess; they are everything and nothing all at once.

  Mom knocks on my open bedroom door. Mother’s working late, so Mom looks a little bit like she doesn’t know what do with herself. Mother gives Mom balance. If my yin and yang war inside of me, Mom’s and Mother’s yin and yang coexist nicely.

  “Reading cards?” she asks.

  “Oh, trying to, but they’re being…nonsense.”

  “Well, you know how cards can be,” Mom says, wandering in. “Deal them for me.”

  I do as she says—Magician, High Priestess, Wheel of Fortune. Hierophant, Strength, Judgment.

  Mom’s eyes flick over them, and she goes super pale. Confused, I look back at the cards.

  “Mom,” I say, because I feel some need to reassure her, she looks so stricken. “They’re just cards.”

  “Deal them again,” says Mom.

  I don’t know that I want to, given the way she’s looking, given the tone of her voice. “I don’t know if—”

  “Deal them again,” Mom practically snaps at me. Which she never does. Mom’s not like that. Mom is all shanti at all times.

  I swallow and brace myself and deal the cards again—Magician, High Priestess, Wheel of Fortune. Hermit, Judgment, Death.

  Mom makes this squeak of a noise. I get the sense it would have been a scream if she’d let it out all the way.

  “Mom,” I say, trying to be soothing. It’s not a job I usually have, soothing Mom. I wish Mother was here; I feel like she’d be much better at this. “It’s nothing. You know how cards are. They’re just—”

  Mom snatches the cards up. “Don’t deal them again.”

  She was the one who just demanded that I deal them again. “Okay,” I say slowly, looking up at her frantic face. Really, what is her deal? I think of the Death card and wonder if she’s taking it really seriously. “Mom. You know that cards don’t really tell the future, right?” I’ve been going along with this idea my whole life, but I don’t know that it’s anything more than just finely tuned intuition, like Mother says. I’ve been humoring Mom, thinking she wasn’t really serious, that it was just elaborate playacting, like making jokes about Santa Claus, but right now it seems like there is nothing more deadly serious than tarot cards for Mom.

  Mom’s pale eyes are sharp and intense and burning. She seems nothing at all like my easygoing hippie Mom. “Don’t deal them again,” she says flatly, and turns on her heel, my deck still in her hands, and marches out of my room.

  • • •

  I don’t bring up the tarot cards again, but it doesn’t matter: I feel like I’m walking on eggshells now around Mom. She and I usually have such a good rapport. We’re a lot like each other, and that makes for not a lot of tension. I know many teenage daughters have roaring fights with their moms and slam a lot of doors and are totally misunderstood, and I’ve always felt very lucky that my mom and I aren’t like that.

  But I feel like we are making up for all of the previously missing tension now. I feel like our lives are nothing but tension. We are like a guitar string that’s been tuned too tightly and is going to snap if touched. I don’t play the guitar, but I assume that’s how that works. We barely talk at the yoga studio, other than for benign pleasantries, because I’m scared to bring up anything more serious, scared she’ll get that look in her eyes again, scared of the merest brush against the taut guitar string of our relationship.

  Mother notices. Of course she does. Mother notices everything, especially about me and Mom.

  Mother knocks on my door when I am in the middle of looking at the stars through my lashes. They are not dancing tonight. They are not doing much of anything. I feel like I’ve lost a little piece of myself, without the tarot cards and the stars. I don’t dare go down and get salt. I’m realizing that, in a weird way, Mom and the stars and the cards and the other odd stuff in my life have always been my friends. And now I’ve lost them. And I don’t really have other friends.

  “What are you up to, Mer?” Mother asks. She asks it almost breezily, as if she wants to be able to pretend that there hasn’t been tension all through our house for the past few days.

  And now that Mother’s here, in my room, giving me an opening, I find that I want to tell her everything. Why was I resisting this before?

  “Did you talk to Mom?” is how I start.

  “No.” Mother sits on my bed. “She won’t talk. She keeps telling me there’s nothing wrong, but I don’t believe that for a second.”

  “I dealt tarot cards the other night.”

  Mother lifts an eyebrow. Effectively: So?

  “And I don’t know what happened but Mom, like, went a little crazy. She took the cards and told me not to deal again, and ever since then, she hasn’t really talked to me.”

  Mother looks thoughtful. “What was the deal?”

  “The deal?” I echo.

  “Yeah. When you dealt the cards, what did they show?”

  “Well…I don’t know. I mean, you know how the cards are. It’s not like they can actually tell the future or anything. They’re just cards. I was only dealing them to see about this boy at school who—”

  It tumbles out of my mouth before I even realize it, and then I want to take it back, because oops! I didn’t want to bring up Trow, given how stupid I’ve behaved around him and the fact that nothing has really happened between us since he blew me off about yoga. It seems silly to talk about Trow when anything with him is basically completely nonexistent. I really am the worst military tactician ever. It’s a good thing I found this out over a boy instead of in some kind of, like, real battle situation.

  “This is the boy?” Mother asks. She looks curious. Not mocking. And I consider. Mother gives good advice. Maybe I should have asked Mother for advice earlier. Mother is good with plans. And my Operation Trow could desperately use some help, let’s face it.

  “Yes. The new boy. Trow.”

  Mother smiles now. “Trow. Nice name. And you like him?”

  Yes. “I barely know him,” I say honestly. “He’s just…” I search for the proper adjective.

  “Cute?” Mother suggests.

  Yes. He is. Definitely. But… “Nice,” I correct.

  “Nice,” says Mother, and her smile widens. “Even better.”

  “But it’s not like we’ve really… I mean, he meditated with
me one day.”

  “That’s a good start, right?”

  “Yes. I guess. Except that then I asked him to yoga and he didn’t seem into that at all and now I don’t know what to do. We basically say hi to each other in the morning and that’s it. How am I supposed to…” I make a noise of utter frustration and trail from the window over to my bed, where I collapse melodramatically. “How do other people do this?”

  Mother chuckles and brushes the rainbow hair away from my face. “Mostly luck.”

  “That’s what I figured. That’s why I was dealing the tarot cards.”

  “Maybe yoga was the wrong way to his heart,” remarks Mother, smiling.

  “But it’s yoga,” I protest. It is part of my heart. I feel like he should see that if we are meant to be. If we are written in the stars.

  “Right, but it’s not everyone’s cup of tea, and sometimes you need persuasion to try things you’re not used to trying. I remember when I met your mom, she was always going on about yoga and trying to get me to go with her, and I thought she was a lunatic with all this talk about lion poses and cobra poses. It’s not like yoga was our first date. Yoga might have been our hundredth date, honestly. But now I like it—it just took some time. So I’m just saying that maybe yoga wasn’t your best opening.”

  I consider this. “What was Mom’s opening with you?”

  Mother smiles, remembering a time that is so long ago that I feel like it ought to exist in fairy tales. “You know that story. She came to me for help with her misdemeanor for writing ‘Love more, hate less’ on a city bus.”

  “I know, but I mean, what was her opening? If it wasn’t yoga?”

  “Well, it was my opening,” Mother says. “Mom didn’t do anything at all.”

  “Okay. So what was your opening?”

  “Coffee,” says Mother, and smiles and then ruffles my hair like I’m three years old, which I let her do because I’m super nice like that. “Don’t worry about your mom and the tarot cards, Mer. I’m sure it’s nothing.”