At the Edge of the Universe

  “Did you know?”

  “About Dad?” he asked, and then said, “Yeah.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  Renny shrugged. “Dad needed an ally, and you’ve always worshipped him.”

  I couldn’t process the new information. All this time, I’d thought my father the victim in my parents’ war, but he’d cheated on Mom. I’d been on the wrong side this whole time.

  “What about that stuff you said about Dad still being in love with Mom?”

  “Him cheating doesn’t make it less true,” Warren said, but I didn’t know how it could be. If he’d loved her, he wouldn’t have slept with another woman.

  “Everything’s changing,” I said.

  Warren sighed heavily. “No shit, Ozzie.” He pulled off his party hat and tossed it onto the table, grabbed his Styrofoam container of éclair pie from the fridge, and headed upstairs.

  “Don’t go, Renny.”

  He paused on the landing. “Party’s over.”

  1,675,009,220 LY

  I PASSED BELLA DONNA THE fakest fake ID of all time outside of a/s/l. I thought Calvin was joking when he’d handed it to me in the parking lot behind the club, but then he’d smiled sheepishly and shrugged. My picture was crooked and the plastic felt flimsy. Worst of all, he hadn’t even made me twenty-one. All he’d done was shift my birthday back a couple of months so I could pass for eighteen. Bella Donna smirked at my ID but drew an X on my hand anyway.

  “See you found your boy,” she said. She let her eyes crawl up and down Calvin, lingering in some places more than others. “I can see why you chased him, baby.”

  I pulled Calvin inside by the arm, not giving him the opportunity to ask what Bella Donna had been talking about.

  Your Mom’s a Paradox was scheduled to perform early in the night—they were the opening band’s opening band—but a/s/l was already crowded to capacity with drunken revelers eager to rock in 2018.

  During the week before the show, Lua had been busy rehearsing, so I’d split my time between working at the bookstore and hanging out with Cal. We fought about our roller coaster and argued about the universe. It was the most fun I’d had since Tommy disappeared. I gave Calvin Plato’s Republic to read and told him to focus on the allegory of the cave. Calvin convinced me to watch Donnie Darko, hoping the concept of the tangent universe from the movie might spark some ideas about Tommy’s disappearance, though I didn’t like how the movie seemed to suggest Donnie was schizophrenic, because it made me think Calvin was insinuating that everything might be in my head when I knew damn well it wasn’t. But I kept that to myself because the time I spent with Cal was the most normal I’d felt in ages.

  When I’d picked up Calvin to go to the club, I’d had to convince him to change into an outfit that wasn’t a black hoodie and jeans. He’d compromised by wearing a long-sleeve black T-shirt and different jeans, but had refused to brush his hair, which grew wilder with each passing day.

  I, on the other hand, had dressed for the occasion in a sleek black velvet suit Lua had convinced me to buy a couple of months ago but which I’d never had the opportunity to wear. I hadn’t dry-cleaned it, and a few spritzes of odor remover had failed to camouflage the old-cigarette-smoke stink, but no one could deny I looked pretty damn good.

  Lua had hitched a ride with the band, so I didn’t see him until the lights rose and he took the stage wearing a silver-sequined tuxedo. He’d gelled his pink hair into chunky spikes and applied dramatic dark makeup to accentuate his eyes and lips. The rest of the band looked painfully drab in comparison.

  Calvin and I hollered loudly for Lua, our voices joined by the enthusiastic crowd. I’d missed spending time with Lua, but by the end of the first song it was clear the practice had paid off. The band tore through each song with an unparalleled intensity and theatrical flair. The only thing missing was a bucket of pig’s blood for dramatic effect.

  It was near the end of the set, during a soulful, acoustic cover of two Taylor Swift songs mashed together, that I realized I was witnessing the precise moment Lua transformed from an unknown singer in a local band into an honest-to-God rock star. He owned the stage and every one of our souls. His confident fingers skated along the strings of his acoustic guitar, gliding through paragraphs, making the whole thing look like magic, while he melded his voice with Poe’s haunting, raspy contralto, and mesmerized the entire club for three minutes and twenty-seven seconds.

  Conversations died, the bartenders stopped serving drinks. Every face in the packed club was tuned to Lua.

  In that moment I glimpsed Lua’s future.

  I realized I’d lost Lua as surely as I’d lost Tommy and would soon lose my brother. Lua was going to leave Cloud Lake. Hell, he was already gone. I didn’t want to watch him go, but I couldn’t turn away. I’d never been so sad to be so happy.

  After the band’s set, Lua joined me and Calvin on the dance floor. I hadn’t told him I was bringing Calvin, and he didn’t question it when he saw us, but I was certain he’d grill me about it later. Lua was magnetic, and kept attracting random strangers who couldn’t stop gushing about the show, and when a tall tattooed woman with platinum-blond hair dragged Lua to the patio to talk, that left me and Calvin to entertain ourselves.

  “Want to get out of here?” I shouted into Calvin’s ear. The band that had taken the stage after Lua played screeching, spastic punk that sounded like puppies in a blender. Actually, I think that was their name. Plus, the air in the club was suffocating, and I was sweating through my velvet suit.

  Calvin nodded.

  We still had over an hour to kill until midnight—I’d considered going home, but I looked hot and refused to let my suit go to waste—so we walked down Clematis Street, becoming just two more party people on the already crowded sidewalks.

  “Lua was amazing,” Calvin said. “I mean, really amazing. He’s going to be famous, isn’t he?” There was something different about Calvin. He seemed more at ease. His limbs were looser, his face more relaxed.

  “Probably.”

  “You don’t sound thrilled.”

  As we walked east from the club, the throngs of midnight-anticipating revelers waxed and waned. Starbucks was booming ahead of us, as was the wine bar across the street, but it was quiet near the railroad tracks.

  “I am,” I said. “But it means I’m going to lose him.”

  “How so?”

  “He’ll sign with a record label or become an Internet sensation and go on tour. I can’t follow the band like some obsessed groupie, so when that happens, we probably won’t see each other a lot.”

  “But aren’t you planning on going away to college anyway?”

  “Maybe. I don’t know.” I stopped at the intersection and waited for the light to change so we could cross. “But that’s not important. I’m happy for Lua, but I’m sad at the same time. Does that make sense?”

  “I guess. It just seems like a waste of time to miss someone before they’ve gone.”

  We walked in silence until Clematis dead-ended at the intracoastal. We sat on the seawall and dangled our legs over the side, but we weren’t alone. Families and couples and groups of friends had gathered to wait for the fireworks. Some sat on the wall like us, others lay stretched out on blankets in the grass. A few boats drifted past, their passengers shouting “Happy New Year!” to us from the water.

  But even surrounded by all those people, I still felt like it was just me and Calvin.

  “There are so many stars out tonight,” Calvin said.

  I looked up at the sky. At the nearly full moon hovering over our heads. At the twinkling stars. “Not as many as there should be,” I muttered.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  Tommy had once told me that astronomers believed it possible that the Milky Way might contain forty billion planets capable of supporting life. If even one tenth of one percent of those were populated by sentient beings, then our galaxy alone could contain over four million life-sus
taining worlds. I didn’t know how many stars had already vanished, but I couldn’t help feeling their loss.

  “Ozzie?” Calvin rested his fingers on my hand. I flinched but he didn’t pull away. “Are you okay?”

  “What if I never find Tommy? What if the universe shrinks until Cloud Lake is all that’s left?”

  “That’s not going to happen.”

  “But it is happening.”

  Calvin scooted closer. Our arms touched and I shivered.

  “After my mom took off,” he said, “my dad went through a religious phase. It didn’t stick, but for a while he was all about going to church and reading the Bible. He even guilt-tripped me into getting baptized at the beach. The one by the pier.”

  “I know it,” I said.

  Calvin cleared his throat. “Anyway, so it was my turn. I waded into the ocean toward Pastor Luke. He said a prayer before he dunked me under. I started to panic, thinking he was trying to drown me. But then God spoke to me.”

  I arched my eyebrow, trying to hide my are-you-kidding-me-with-this look. “What’d God say?”

  “He told me I could breathe.”

  “Well, that’s anticlimactic.”

  “Underwater,” he added. “And when God says you can do a thing, you do it, right? So I opened my mouth and I breathed.” Either Calvin was such a good actor he should have been auditioning for the lead in the school play, or he actually believed God had spoken to him.

  “Come on. You’re messing with me now.”

  “I swear I’m not.”

  “So, what? You’re Aquaman?”

  Even as more onlookers waiting for the fireworks to begin crowded in around us, I still felt like the night belonged to me and Calvin alone.

  “You asked me what had changed. Why I quit wrestling and let my grades slip.”

  “You gave up because God said you could breathe underwater.”

  “Yes, but no.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “We think we’re supposed to drown when we breathe underwater, but we don’t have to. We just have to believe.”

  “That’s fine,” I said. “But what do you believe in?”

  Calvin shrugged. “I’m not sure yet.”

  “I remember people and things that no one else does, and you talk to God.” I smiled at Cal. “We’re the lamest superhero duo ever.”

  Calvin’s clear laugh rang through the night, drawing eyes to us. “Just, if we start fighting crime, you have to wear that suit.”

  “Deal.”

  A light streaked across the sky. Just a faint flare that disappeared so quickly it could have been my eyes playing tricks on me.

  But it wasn’t.

  “Falling star,” Calvin said. “What’d you wish for?”

  I glanced at Cal and tried to smile. “Don’t tell me you believe in wishes.”

  Calvin smiled impishly. “No . . . but, okay: What would you wish for?”

  “To find Tommy. For my parents to get their shit together, to not know my father is a cheating prick, for someone to tell me what I’m supposed to do with the rest of my life, for Warren to come home safe and intact. I could go on.”

  “You miss him a lot, huh?”

  “Warren? He’s not even gone yet, but I wouldn’t say I miss him, so much as I don’t want him to die.”

  “Tommy,” he said. “I meant Tommy.”

  “Oh. Yeah. I really do.”

  “I figured.” Calvin sounded disappointed. “We should probably start walking back.”

  I looked around. The number of people had doubled since we’d arrived. “You don’t want to wait for the fireworks?”

  “Not really.”

  We returned to a/s/l with less than five minutes to spare before midnight. Lua found us and planted a sweaty, sloppy kiss on both me and Calvin when the digital clock over the bar turned twelve. He begged us to stay and dance until dawn, but Calvin said he needed to go home, and I wasn’t feeling the loud and drunk crowd that had squeezed into the nearly filled-to-capacity club anymore. Despite what I’d said about missing Tommy, I found the one thing I wanted at that moment was to spend more time alone with Calvin, even though that thought made me feel simultaneously guilty and giddy and a little sick to my stomach. Either way, I was grateful to him for providing me with an excuse to escape.

  As I drove, Calvin sat so quietly and so still in the car I thought he might have fallen asleep. I shuffled through one of Lua’s playlists to cover the silence. When we reached Calvin’s house, I parked in his empty driveway.

  “I guess my dad got called into work,” he said. “Wanna come inside?”

  “I don’t know.” I definitely didn’t want to go home, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to spend the rest of my New Year’s Eve with Calvin either. I turned off the headlights but left the engine running.

  Calvin was looking out the windshield at the sky. In the quiet between the end of one song and the beginning of another, he turned down the stereo and said, “Want to know what I wished for?”

  “What?” I turned to Calvin, and he kissed me on the mouth. It happened so fast—all lips and tongue and minty freshness—and ended before I could properly kiss him back.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I shouldn’t have done that.”

  But as I stared at his face, his lips, his wild hair—as our arms touched, and I took his hand—I realized I wanted him to kiss me again.

  I reached my hand around Calvin’s neck and pulled him toward me. I kissed him, gentler but with more intensity than the first time. Neither of us spoke as we groped each other, and he pulled me over the armrest and emergency brake into his seat, and it seemed like only seconds later that he’d unbuttoned my shirt and I’d pulled his over his head, and we’d tugged our pants down around our ankles.

  Calvin kissed my chest and stomach and hips, teasing me, and I thought about how there might have been a million billion other teenage couples having awkward almost-sex in cars on far-off planets if the stars they orbited hadn’t disappeared. But then I pushed those thoughts away and squeezed onto the floor between Calvin’s legs.

  Before I went down on him, I looked into his eyes and said, “You okay with this?”

  He nodded, unable to even speak it seemed, which made me smile.

  Despite the buildup and our playful teasing, we rushed to and through the savage crescendo, and then quickly retreated to our own seats—sweaty and sticky and panting—as the inevitable postorgasm embarrassment crept in.

  “Sorry,” I said as I shimmied into my underwear and pants. “It’s been a while and—”

  Calvin shook his head. “No, it was good.”

  Now that I could think clearly without my head clouded by hormones, Tommy barged in and demanded to know what the hell I thought I was doing. How could I claim to love him and then do what I’d done with Cal? I was a hypocrite for judging my dad and then cheating on Tommy. It didn’t matter that Tommy was gone for everyone else, he wasn’t gone for me. I’d betrayed him, and he wouldn’t want me when I found him because of what I’d done. I wished I could take it back. All of it. Go back to the beginning of the night and tell Calvin he couldn’t come. Except, I was glad he was there. My head and my heart were so full of conflicting feelings that they threatened to overwhelm me.

  Calvin startled me when he spoke. “Well, this night certainly didn’t turn out the way I’d expected.” He’d managed to mostly redress, but hadn’t buttoned his jeans, and his shirt was on inside out.

  “Understatement of the decade,” I muttered.

  I was so confused. Part of me did feel like I’d cheated on Tommy, another part thought I might genuinely like Calvin. Still another part wondered if I only liked Calvin because he seemed to believe me about Tommy. Either way, I needed Calvin to get out of the car so I could go home and think without him sitting beside me all beautiful eyes and gorgeous smile, the smell of sex radiating off his skin.

  “That’s obviously not the first time you’ve done that,” Calvin said, brea
king the silence.

  I rolled my eyes. “The first with someone I hardly know.”

  Calvin shrugged. “We know lots about each other. For instance, now I know you’re kind of a slut.”

  The words ripped through me, like Calvin had reached into my mind and pulled out the truth I’d been thinking about myself but hadn’t wanted to admit and rammed it down my throat. My guilt would be branded into my skin for Tommy to see when he returned, and how could I face him then? He’d come home and reject me, and I wouldn’t be able to blame anyone else for my inability to keep my stupid dick in my pants.

  “Get out.”

  Calvin’s smile faded. “Ozzie? I was only joking.”

  “Get. Out.” I flipped on my headlights and shifted the car into drive.

  Calvin fumbled with the handle and scrambled out of the car. He stood in the grass, the door still open, and said, “Seriously, Ozzie, it was a joke.”

  I jammed my foot on the gas and tore down Calvin’s street. The force drove the door partially shut. As soon as I was free of Calvin’s subdivision, I pulled over and went around to the passenger side door. I opened it and slammed it shut. I slammed it over and over and over, but it wasn’t enough.

  I drove to the beach and stumbled down the dunes to the edge of the water. I yelled at the sky to give me Tommy back even though I didn’t deserve him. But the sky was empty. The stars, all the stars, were gone. I didn’t even need to check my phone to know that the universe had shrunk again, and the stars had vanished.

  No. They hadn’t vanished. I’d given them away to someone who hadn’t deserved them, and I’d never get them back.

  TOMMY

  “SORRY THE CONDOM BROKE, OZZIE.”

  I stand on the front steps of the unfinished house—abandoned midconstruction when the real estate market bottomed out—holding Tommy’s hand, watching the sun punch through the clouds, stretching its arms across the sky with a yawn that feels like forever.

  “What?” Everything looks watercolor through my bloodshot eyes. My tie is long gone, as are the top two buttons of my dress shirt, which was neatly pressed once upon a time. I want coffee, but there’s the sunrise and there’s Tommy Ross.