The Chaos of Stars

  But no one’s asking me.

  A hugely fat white Persian cat skulks into the room. Still planning my changes, I reach down and scratch her ears absently as she twines her way around my legs, purring like a street bike.

  “Whoa.”

  “Whoa what?” I ask. Ry is staring in amazement at the cat.

  “Hera doesn’t like anyone.”

  “Oh.” I look down. Her sharp, intelligent eyes regard me with something bordering on playful worship, like we’re in on the same eternal joke. There’s a reason cats were near deity in ancient Egypt. Dogs may be loyal, but cats are smart. This one must recognize our bond. You can take the cat out of Egypt, but you can’t take Egypt out of the cat.

  Wow, I should have that embroidered on a pillow or something.

  With a pang I’m reminded of Ubesti. I never let my parents get me another pet after her. Just another thing to love and lose. I gently shoo Ry’s cat away with my foot. She mews reproachfully and saunters out of the room.

  Ry watches her go, eyes narrowed, then shakes his head. “Want anything?” he asks Scott, who’s engrossed in a video game. It’s so big on the television that I don’t know how he can keep track of anything going on.

  “Nah, I’m good.”

  “Coke, Isadora?”

  “Yes, please.”

  He pulls a cold can out of a hidden fridge in the bar and hands it to me. “So.”

  “So?”

  “The entryway is off-limits, but what would you do with this room?”

  “What makes you think I’d do anything with it?”

  His dimple shows up. “You glared at the blinds.”

  “It’s a great room! Really. But . . .” My mouth twists into a reluctant smile. I detail my plans, and Ry nods, following my finger as I point out what would go and what could stay.

  “. . . And the overhead lighting is pretty, but wrong for this room. There shouldn’t be any fixtures, just recessed lights along the edges of the room, with a dimmer so you could control the level.”

  “I should have you talk to my mom,” he says, thoughtfully staring at where the popcorn machine would go.

  “Is she here?” Scott sits up straight, suddenly engaged in the conversation.

  “Don’t think so.”

  “Aw, crap.”

  “Plans for hitting on DeeDee thwarted?” Tyler asks as she walks into the room and sits next to Scott.

  “Sadly, yes.”

  “Wait—you want to—his mom?” Eww. Just, eww. People suck. “You’re okay with that, Tyler?”

  Tyler shrugs, her sharp shoulders lifting the corners of her mouth at the same time. “Yeah. But only because I’d probably make out with her if I got the chance, too. You should see her.”

  I look at Ry in horror, embarrassed for his sake, but he shakes his head. “Used to it.”

  “Really, you need to see her,” Tyler insists.

  “Really, I can promise you that I’ll have no desire whatsoever to hit on Ry’s mom if and when I see her. Ever.”

  Tyler and Scott snort their private laughter. “Sure. If you think Ry’s gorgeous, just wait.”

  “Who says I think Ry’s gorgeous?” I say, raising an eyebrow.

  “Nature pretty much demands it. Unless—are you a robot?” Scott slaps his forehead. “Of course!”

  Tyler nods solemnly. “We should have seen it sooner. That long, elegant neck, those eyes, the hips, the perpetual good-hair days. Totally a robot.”

  “The only question that remains is whether she’s a good robot, or an evil one.”

  “Well, Hera liking you might indicate you’re evil,” Ry says. “But then again, nothing evil could appreciate my truck as much as you do. Speaking of, can I offer you rides anywhere you want for the rest of the summer in return for redesigning my bedroom?”

  “Time for us to go!” Tyler says, standing up so fast she dumps Scott, who had his legs across her lap, on the ground. “Just remembered we have a thing! I’ll call you later!” She practically skips out of the room, dragging her grinning boyfriend by the hand.

  That blonde? Evil. I’m going to make her take every Children’s Discovery Room shift for a month.

  “So,” Ry says, turning toward me, his face a picture of innocence but his eyes doing that thing where they erase the rest of the world. “You think they want us to get together?”

  I choke on my mouthful of Coke, narrowly avoiding spewing it all down my front, then focus on Ry, glaring. If he thinks I’m going to be coy about this, he’s wrong. I refuse to flirt. “Yeah, actually, I do think she’s trying to set us up.”

  He nods. “Tyler tends to go into mother-hen mode. She thinks I’m by myself too often, and obviously thinks the same of you, which in her mind turns into making us a couple.”

  “I’m not going to date you.”

  He has the nerve to look puzzled, and—oh floods, are you kidding me—sad. “Have I done something to you?”

  “I—no. It’s not you. I’m not going to date anyone. Ever.”

  “Really?” He sits down on the couch like he expects me to follow suit. I stay standing.

  “Really. I have no desire whatsoever to date and get married and have kids.”

  “The one doesn’t lead immediately to the others, you know. There are stages in between, or so I’ve heard. Could be a rumor, though.”

  I roll my eyes. “Whatever. What’s the point? Nothing lasts forever. Relationships only hurt.”

  Sometimes I wonder if my parents ever loved each other. They barely exist on the same plane. My dad cheated on my mom with her sister, whether or not he meant to, and she still pulled out all the stops to resurrect him. For what? A husband who’d rather be in the underworld than in ours.

  And in spite of all that, they have each other, forever. They last forever, their marriage lasts forever, there is no loss, no breaking up, no inevitability of death. I think if I fell in love with someone, I’d never be able to breathe, never be able to function because of the fear.

  I’m already going to lose myself. I never want to have to deal with losing someone else, too.

  “That’s kind of bleak,” Ry says. “I think you’re wrong.”

  “What do you know about it?” I snap.

  Ry shrugs. “My parents broke up.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.” Deflated, I sit gingerly on the edge of the couch. Great, Isadora. Brilliant. Make fun of his house and then bring up his own family pain. Sometimes I forget I’m not the only one with a past. Ry’s a real person, too.

  “Nah, it’s okay. It was a long time ago. My mom thought she wanted other things, and my dad couldn’t forgive her for it. They spent a while chasing different lives and being unhappy, and then they got back together. They’ve been pretty good ever since.”

  “That must have been really hard for you.”

  “I wasn’t born yet. But none of us is perfect, right? And if you love someone, you have to deal with that. If you ask me, love is what makes everything worth it. Otherwise what’s the point of anything? Besides, I’m glad they worked it out. I kinda like existing.” He nudges me with his elbow, grinning, and I have to smile back.

  “Fine. But I say, skip loving someone so you never have to deal with it.”

  He doesn’t look away from my eyes, trapping me in the perfect blue of his, then claps his hands together like he’s come to a decision. “Are you also morally opposed to being friends? Does that mysteriously lead to immediate babies, too?”

  My heart flutters a tiny bit—like it knows maybe I’m in trouble here, like it’d rather steel up and have me flip him off, or laugh in his face, or shrug him away. But he’s a real person to me now, someone with pain and weirdness and heartache woven into the narrative of his life. And he seems sincere, and it might be nice to have a friend in addition to Tyler.

  “I guess not,” I finally answer, well aware that I paused far too long before responding. But friendship isn’t something that should be taken lightly, right? “Although Tyler will be wa
y happier about it than she deserves to be.”

  “I think she deserves to be happy. And now that we’re friends, can I get your advice on my room? It’s pretty bad.”

  “How bad are we talking?”

  “Two words: sports theme.”

  “Floods, we’d better get started. What did you have in mind?”

  He looks at me for a long time before smiling. “I’m thinking a color scheme of browns with accents of hunter green.” He holds out a hand to help me up from the couch, and as I take it and feel his hand around mine in a shock of human contact and something more, that part that warned me of trouble is proved absolutely right.

  Sobs rack my body as I slam my door shut behind me.

  They don’t want me.

  They don’t want me.

  It’s a tomb! I’m going to die! They’ve known it this whole time!

  Exhausted from rage and grief, I do what I always do when I need to calm down, and kneel in front of the altar in my room.

  “No,” I say, filled with horror. Because as I stare at the altar, I realize that no one prays to me. No one prays to my brother Sirus, or my sister Essa, or any of us. Because we don’t matter.

  I fall back, feeling like the altar has punched a hole in my chest. Of course they don’t need me to last forever. My mother has a baby every twenty years. A new one to train up in the ways of worshipping herself and her family.

  We’re not children. We’re power sources.

  Screaming, I stand and kick the altar. It doesn’t move. I brace myself against the wall and kick against it as hard as I can, and it slowly leans until gravity takes over and it crashes to the ground, breaking into three pieces.

  I sniffle, wipe my eyes. An inky darkness, like oil and fog, seeps out of the broken pieces, getting bigger, wider, darker. It oozes toward the door, toward where my mother waits on the other side, asking if she can come in.

  “Mom?” I whisper, all my anger frozen into fear.

  She doesn’t answer.

  Chapter 8

  “Take my son,” begged Nephthys, voice a whisper, eyes down. “Shield him from the wrath of Osiris.”

  Isis looked at the boy, the son of her husband and her sister. She looked at her sister. She held out her arms.

  Anubis was the son of Osiris. Isis protected him the way Nephthys couldn’t, then sent him to the underworld to take a place by his father’s side. She found him an inheritance, a role, a domain to be a god in.

  But she wanted more for Horus. Horus would have the crown of all Egypt.

  Maybe she used up all of her maternal energy on him, because the rest of us just got dead cats in jars.

  “THIS IS THE MOST STRAIGHTFORWARDLY named restaurant I have ever seen.” I stare up at the sign declaring we are about to eat at Extraordinary Desserts. There’s a funky, bright brushed-metal latticework glamming up the outside of the one-story building, and I already love the look of the place. It’s day two of my Official Friendship with Ry. I think these things should always be declared officially. It makes it much less complicated when he invites me to go get food. Friends do that, and I know we’re friends. No reason to overthink.

  “It’s not false advertising,” Ry says. We walk in through a huge black door and are greeted by display cases of the desserts, which, floods, look extraordinary.

  I lean over the glass. Even the names of the desserts taste like sugar in my mouth. Flower petals adorn the most beautiful plates of food I’ve ever seen. Some even have gold-flake accents. I will spend my entire daily allowance here. “I want everything.”

  “Bread pudding,” Ry says.

  I raise an eyebrow, dubious. “Bread pudding. We’re staring at rows of cheesecake and chocolate and fruit tarts and cake, and you want to eat bread . . . mixed with pudding.”

  Ry nods. “Trust me. We’ll get a few other things, but once you’ve had the bread pudding, you won’t ever want anything else here.”

  I don’t trust him on that at all. We sit down outside and order. I get a pot of tea, the afternoon chill from the clouds barely enough to justify it.

  “How do you feel about Indian food?” Ry asks, toying with his napkin. He’s wearing a heather-gray tee today, and I like it but I prefer him in blue.

  I mean, I have no preferences. I don’t care what he wears. Just the aesthetics, that’s all. “I’m game for anything. I grew up on about five different meals rotated on an eternal basis, so this is all good.”

  “You’re lucky we’re friends.” His dimple is the exclamation mark to his cocky grin.

  I shake my head, but I smile, too. “I could find restaurants by myself. I do know how to use the internet.”

  “Ah, but you never would have ordered bread pudding. You need me.”

  I drum my fingers on the table, then snap. “I almost forgot! Here.” I pull out my black messenger bag. “I needed to pick up a new notebook with graph paper, and I noticed your notebook was almost full, so I . . .” I trail off, holding out a deep-blue, leather-bound notebook. Well, journal, really. Nicer than the one I’d seen him using, but this was so beautiful and when I saw the color I thought instantly of Ry.

  “Seriously?” His face lights up, so honestly delighted that I want to laugh. Something flutters in my stomach, and I hope it simply means I’m hungry.

  “I’m enabling your antisocial tendencies.” In part it’s an I’m-sorry gift, though I’d never say so out loud. I realized yesterday that he didn’t laugh at me when I said my passion was interior design, but I had been kind of a jerk about his writing. I actually like it about him, like that he has such a bizarre focus and pastime.

  He takes the book, flipping through the pages, fingering them gently. “I’m not feeling very antisocial today,” he says.

  Neither am I. The waitress comes, and I drown my flutters in herbal tea. And then bread pudding, which is warm and soft, with just the right balance of rich dark chocolate and cool, sweet cream.

  Ry laughs, because he doesn’t even have to ask me if I like it. I’ve already eaten the whole thing and am plotting the soonest moment I can come back for another.

  “So,” Tyler says, leaning in conspiratorially while Michelle finishes a phone call next to us. “You and Ry have been spending a lot of time together the last couple days.”

  “Mmm,” I answer.

  “How’s that going?” She waggles her eyebrows in undisguised glee.

  “I am more likely to end up romantically involved with his cat than him.”

  The glee falls off her face. “You—what? Gosh, if I’d known you had a thing for long-haired Persians, I’d have set you up with my family’s landlord.”

  I snort and shove her shoulder. “Seriously. Ry and I are friends. That’s it.”

  “Ooookay. Sure. If you say so. Speaking of friends, what are you doing this weekend? I’m thinking a movie marathon. As long as snuggling up on a couch in a dim room next to Ry for hours on end won’t interfere with this whole friends thing you’re rocking . . .”

  “Not an issue. But maybe invite your landlord, too, since he’s clearly more my type.”

  Tyler jumps in surprise as Michelle lets out an explosive swearing tirade next to me. That much foulness coming out of her tiny body never ceases to amuse me, especially because it so rarely happens.

  “The insurers won’t let us set up the pieces until the night before the exhibit opens. They want everything to stay in the high-security storage center until the last possible moment. How are we supposed to get everything ready when we can’t even place the artifacts?”

  Huffing, she stomps up the stairs toward the wing we’re going to be using. I haven’t seen it yet.

  Really, though, I can’t blame them for being paranoid about security. The poor guard is still in intensive care in the hospital; he’s on several organ-donor lists. They have no idea what happened to him, which makes it all way creepier. And I’m grateful that Michelle was too nervous to give my mother specifics on the attempted robbery, otherwise I’m pretty sure
I’d be on the next flight back to Cairo. It had nothing to do with me, anyway.

  Besides, it’s hard to feel threatened here in the daytime, the cheerful, bright warmth pushing out the memory of June gloom and everything else dark or dreary.

  The nights are another matter. But sunshine! I will focus on that.

  The sunshine I’m focusing on barely makes it into the room Michelle opens. Even I am at a loss as to how they thought this would ever work. It’s not really a room so much as a massive hallway, stretching two-thirds the entire length of the building. It’s got tremendously high ceilings, 3.7 meters I’d guess, but it’s only about 2.5 meters wide.

  Half of a wall has the remnants of some ill-begotten mural celebrating Central American indigenous cultures, and the rest of the walls are all splotchy white. A tiny row of windows lined up near the ceiling on the right side lets in a dusty trickle of natural light.

  Her rage gone as if it never existed, Michelle studies the room as though her efficient, business-oriented gaze could whip it into shape by sheer force of will. “I still think we should disassemble one of the other exhibits and store it in here. Use a main room.”

  “I am not disassembling that gigantic tree of evolution,” Tyler says, setting down a broom and leaning against the wall.

  Michelle nods. “You’re probably right. We should have all the other exhibits open to avoid bottlenecking this one.” She gestures to a wall. “We can continue the color scheme from the Egypt wing—greens and purples and maybe a mural, then—”

  “For the love of these idiot gods, anything but that.”

  Michelle and Tyler both look at me, shocked. I shrug apologetically. “Didn’t mean to say that out loud. No offense, but the Egypt room needs an update. Let’s think of something new.”

  Raising an eyebrow, Michelle smiles. “So, what should we do?”