Lost Stars (8 page)

He explained that he had a particular fondness for drywall screws, not just because they were inexpensive but because, contrary to popular belief, they could be gentle on wood. But if you were screwing two pieces of wood together, he cautioned, you should always go with a wood screw. He said this with all the authority of a parent, as if cautioning us not to take candy from strangers. As if he were preparing us for life.

First we would practice the simplest of tasks: hammering nails into wood. What could be so hard about that?

Almost immediately, I whacked my left index finger with the hammer.

“Jeesh!” I said, lifting my hand up to blow on it.

“First thing to know is to get your hand out of the way,” Lynn said.

“I'll be sure to violate the laws of nature next time so the nail can stand on its own.”

“Just tap it a tiny bit, applying some pressure,” he said, demonstrating. “And then hold it nearer the bottom and give it a couple of solid, but not wild, whacks.” His went in with two pounds of the hammer.

“You have arms like the Hulk,” I said. “It might take me more than a couple.”

“Just keep trying,” he said. And I did. After three nails, I sort of kind of did it okay, even though my index finger was throbbing.

Then we worked on drilling the screws into wood, and after that, we each took turns, under heavy supervision, with the circular saw. Except that Tonya was so good at it that she became the heavy supervision.

“You ready?” she asked Jimmie, who nodded meekly as she fired it up. Poor Jimmie—​he was even less likely to have a girlfriend than I was a boyfriend. “Slow and steady,” she said, gliding his hands forward.

When it was my turn, I put on my protective eyewear, which was giant on my tiny head, and I had to step on a wood block to get the right height. “I don't need help,” I said to Tonya, but it was pretty terrifying when I flipped the switch on this giant monster of a tool that ate its way so quickly through a solid piece of wood. It seemed to be moving without me and then I kind of got the hang of it, gliding it across the wood until I reached the other side. I felt this terrible, embarrassing thrill that I immediately wanted to discard.

“Rye Bread, what are you
doing?
” I heard Tommy's voice calling. He had apparently decided to drive by at this inopportune moment. The benefit of not having to work.

I ignored his fading cackle until he'd driven away. Then I put the saw down and announced, “I'm done.”

Later we moved on to what Lynn called “leveling the ground,” but I was pretty sure it was ditch digging, whacking at mounds of black soil. We were back on the path between the calcium deposit and the observatory, a path so worn and eroded that it turned into muddy slush anytime it rained.

“The best time to work with the earth is when it's slightly moist,” Lynn told us. “Not too dry, not too wet.” To demonstrate, he inserted the end of the shovel into a mound of dark dirt and hoisted it up, shushing the dirt off gently toward the tree line. “We are truly blessed today, because even though it hasn't rained, there's enough moisture in the air to loosen the soil.”

“Praise the loam!” I said, but only Tonya—​ever a fan of earth science—​chuckled. What was it about boot camp that made me so unfunny? Tonya resumed her look of superiority. “So, Lynn, why is it better if the soil's moist? Wouldn't it be easier if it was dry?” I said this skeptically, as if I didn't believe Lynn, as if, with my grade-ahead-in-science brain, I understood more about the particles of soil than a psychologist-plus-youth-construction-chain-gang leader.

“It's the same as a blender,” Lynn said placidly. “You need some moisture to allow it to move. It gets compacted when dry and too heavy when wet.” He paused. “Does that answer your question, Caraway?”

“Completely,” I said. I could somehow feel Tonya rolling her eyes.

“Troops, fall out,” she called as she assumed her position, hovering over the shovel, raising her right foot to press the shovel's mouth deep into the perfectly moist soil.

Tonya was especially adept at this work and not particularly approving of my tendency to lean on my shovel and watch her. She made mechanical, almost rhythmic movements, the shushing sound of the shovel going in and the maraca-like cascade of the dirt falling off it. But when I took up my own shovel and tried to do the same, barely any dirt graced the end of it. I had to practically jump on it to get it below the surface of the dirt, and then it took all my strength to push it through and get a half shovel's worth of the soil. Apparently this was very entertaining, as several of the other kids had temporarily suspended operations to watch me wrestle a shovel.

“I'm like a foot shorter than the rest of you,” I said.

“Nothing to see here, folks,” Tonya called out.

“This does not seem legal.”

Tonya responded to my observation with a snort. “This is your
job.
”

“Not by choice,” I replied, to which she just shook her head. Well, add her to the list of people I'd disappointed. She looked over at Kelsey and Jimmie, who were having a contest to see who could shovel the most dirt.

By the time Lynn came over to inspect my work, I'd already given up. I was leaning against my shovel, inhaling the sharp scent of pine needles and the cloudy smell of dirt circulating through the air.

“Caraway,” Lynn said, hands on thighs, half crouching to get down to my height, “I know this is hard work, but there are ways to appreciate it. Doesn't it feel good to be actually contributing something to the world?” I managed not to point out that our contribution was digging—​in some ways the opposite of a contribution. A subtraction. “Doesn't the weight of the shovel just feel so good in your hands?”

“Not really,” I said. “My hands have leprosy.” I held them up to show him the still-scarred skin. Two of my calluses had sloughed off, though I had to admit that the occasional application of jewelweed seemed to be helping.

I could see I was wearing him down, that his optimism was eroding much as this path had, and it gave me a rumble of satisfaction inside. I could make anyone hate me. Maybe I sucked at construction work, but my power to alienate was intact.

But for some reason I picked up the shovel and I thrust it into the ground where it filled with that dark, sparkly soil, soil made of elements that had been here since the dawn of Earth, and then I hoisted it out and deposited it onto the growing mound. And, okay. It did feel kind of good. But it wasn't like I was going to say that.

When I called Soo later in the week, her voice sounded faraway and sad. Boy trouble, I figured, and braced myself for listening to the boring details.

“Who died?” I asked. “It's awful quiet over there.”

“Nobody died,” she said. “We're just sworn to silence like a bunch of monks. We're going to stop being teenagers and become monks.”

“I have no idea what you're talking about,” I said.

Soo's mother had declared a moratorium on the basement until we swore to be quieter so she could hear the full romantic bass of Ricardo Montalban's accent when she watched reruns of
Fantasy Island.
This had happened earlier in the week, on one of those nights when I was sequestered in my room.

“What are we going to do?” I asked. “Piece of Toast can't live without its practice space.”

“Not funny,” said Soo. “We're going to soundproof the basement.”

“What does that entail?” I picked some dirt from my fingernails and rubbed the spot on my nail that was beginning to turn black.

“We're getting all this foam stuff that we're going to install.”

“And who's supposed to actually do that?” I asked. “I don't remember any of us actually having skills other than guitar playing. And even Tommy can't really do that.”

In a way I was glad a construction project was going to preempt our normal hangouts. I didn't want to see Dean again after that night. I mean, of course, I wanted to see him again. I just didn't want him to see me. I wanted to see him if I could place a few droplets of some memory-loss serum into his nonalcoholic drink so he'd forget my special hugging session with the toilet.

“You are,” Soo said. “Aren't you a construction worker now?”

“I failed the shovel test,” I said.

“Just joking. Dean is super handy. He's going to the hardware store to get all this stuff, and he's going to show us what to do.”

“Oh,” I said. “Well, you guys have fun.”

“
Us,
” Soo said. “You're coming too.”

And that's how I came to park my bike in front of Soo's on Saturday morning, next to the five cars in the driveway: Soo's mom's Pontiac Firebird convertible (the one we'd taken out and driven around with the top down on several nights after Soo's mom was “asleep,” aka passed out), Soo's Le Car, Tommy's BMW, Tiger's Volkswagen Rabbit, and a dusty old green Jeep that I didn't recognize. Well, I almost didn't recognize it. Its form was vaguely familiar—​I'd seen it behind our fence.

The gang was gathered in the basement, staring at a giant bucket of something called Noiseproofing Blue Glue and a bunch of big, floppy sheets of foam. I pretended not to notice the presence of the world's most beautiful boy, but then the beautiful boy started explaining the principles of soundproofing, because the world's most beautiful boy was also handy, which made him even more beautiful.

“So, in the ideal world, we'd install additional fiberglass insulation, preferably with a higher R-value” he was saying. Tiger and Tommy nodded as if they were actual men who understood what Dean was saying. “But I don't think Soo's mom wants us to expose to the studs, and we probably can't decouple the drywall, so we're just going with damping the sound.”

“So, just pour some Coke on it?” I asked. He was forced to look at me, a confused smile taking over his face. “You said ‘damp' it, right?”

Oh, crap. I was once again in the flat-joke zone. I wanted to hide in the walls with the low-level R-value, or whatever he'd said.

“Mountain Dew would probably work better, but in the meantime I was gonna go with putting this up to absorb the sound,” he said, holding up a layer of the charcoal-colored foam. “So, we have to apply this compound over the walls, hold the foam in place with a staple gun. We also have to do the door—​we have to put a layer of MDF over it with the blue glue sandwiched in between.”

Maybe we needed Tonya to get this done. Or someone who spoke Dean's language?

“So, yeah, we should do it in twos,” Dean said. “Um, Greta, why don't you and Tiger do the back wall—​you can apply the glue and Tiger can do the stapling.”

“That's such a girl's job,” said Greta. “I can use a staple gun.”

“Okay, you staple, he'll glue. And Justin and Soo can start on the stereo wall.”

“It'll probably take half the day just to take the records off the shelf,” Soo said.

“It'll be worth it, babe,” Justin said. I refrained from the fake vomit sound this time.

“So what should Carrie and I do?” Tommy asked. Shit. Crap. I was not getting picked for the right kickball team.

“Oh, well, Carrie's going to help me with the door,” Dean said. We must have suddenly jolted three light years closer to the sun because my whole face turned hot. “You're the floater.”

Tommy's face melted into some form of disagreeableness. “That doesn't sound like a good job.”

“Oh, it's the most important job,” Dean said. “Everybody needs you. Go over and help Greta and Tiger first.”

“I've been told you're the only one who knows how to use a hammer,” he whispered to me as Tommy walked away. Which only made my face hotter and redder, and then I was embarrassed that my face was red and hot, and it got worse. I was the color of a red supergiant star.

I showed him the expanding splotch of blackness on my fingernail. “If using a hammer means hurting myself with it, then, yes. I'm an expert.”

Everyone else moved away to do their jobs, but Dean and I just stood there not looking at each other. It felt like the moment lasted all 31,557,600 seconds that it takes to get around the sun in a year, and for a minute, I didn't know if I was actually there or not. I was so uncomfortable I might have actually evaporated. Then Dean said, “So, um, you want to grab that bucket of glue and I'll take the boards?”

“Yeah,” I said. My voice cracked. Wonderful.

I went to grab the glue but I still had my backpack on and it tumbled off me, all its contents spilling out. Dean bent down to help me gather my things as I rushed to get them back, but before I could grab it, he took the opened notebook, with its Vira memorabilia exposed.

“What's this?” he asked.

“Ummmmm,” I said. “My notebook?”

“Yeah, it's your notebook,” he said. “What's in it?”

“Well,” I said. Then—​what the hell, I'd already pretty much thrown up in front of him: “These are my calculations. I'm charting the progress of the Vira comet.”

“What is that?”

“Oh, um, you know that we're going to see the comet this summer for the first time in ninety-seven years, right?”

“I may have not read the paper the day they announced that,” he said.

“So, yeah, the first sighting of it was in the third centry. That same thing has been circling the sun—​well, not exactly in a circle but in an ellipse—​for hundreds of thousands of years.”

Please, would my mouth stop opening and closing?

“You're really into astrophysics, huh?” he asked, putting my wallet and my hairbrush into the backpack.

“Well, I think it's too late for me to pretend to not be.” I zipped up the bag and stood up again, hoping we could start soundproofing and stop elaborating on my nerd-dom. We walked up the basement steps to the door. Dean took the hard plastic top of the bucket and gave me a thick paintbrush. The glue was a terrifying shade of electric blue. “Is this going to kill my brain cells?”