The Starfish Sisters: A Novel

Two waitresses bring out our food, pancakes and bowls of whipped cream and piles of bacon and scrambled eggs. We dig in happily. Jasmine gives us some more facts on tsunamis, and Ben gleefully joins in, impressing her.

It isn’t until after the meal, when we are stuffed to the gills and leaning back happily, that the whole thing goes south. Suze glances over her shoulder, sees the restaurant is thinly populated, and asks Jasmine to let her out. Her mouth lifts on one side and she says to me quietly, “I’m going to the bathroom all by myself.”

I chuckle. “You want me to come with you?”

“I can do it.”

Jasmine takes her hand. “I want to go, too,” she says, and some part of me knows she’s being protective, as she’s seen me do.

“That would be great.”

They saunter toward the ladies’ room.

Ben says, “Hey, Phoebe.”

I look at him. “Hey, Ben.”

“I was wondering if you might—”

Yelling breaks out at the front of the restaurant, and I’m on my feet before I register that it’s the man who was glaring at us, furiously screaming at Suze, who’s trying to push Jasmine behind her, but Jasmine isn’t that compliant. I hear the man say, Elites . . . ruining the country . . . God will punish, and then I see Jasmine pull away from Suze and kick the man in the shin.

“Shut up!” she cries. “You’re a bully!”

The man raises his hand as if to strike Jasmine, but Suze shoves him with both hands. “Don’t you dare.”

By then I’ve reached them, and so has the store manager, who sticks her hand between them. “Get out,” she says to the man. “Or I will call the police.”

He starts to rant, and she pulls the phone from her pocket. “I mean it. And you’d better not ever show your face in here again.”

“I’m a regular customer!” he protests. “She’s a Hollywood elite who—”

“Is safe here. You get out.”

He whirls around and storms out, muttering. I drop to my knees and grab Jasmine. “What were you thinking?”

“He was being mean!”

“I know, but you just can’t do stuff like that.” Tears well in the back of my throat. What if he’d had a gun? What if he’d hit her? “Let adults manage things, will you?”

Suze is standing there, frozen. Her hands are shaking, and Ben comes up beside her. “Let’s get you home.”

“We should report it to the sheriff,” I say, standing. “Considering the squirrel.”

“Squirrel?” Ben echoes.

I cover Jasmine’s ears. “A dead squirrel on her doorstep.”

Suze’s face goes pale. “Do you think he was the one who did it?”

“I don’t know. If it was, I would feel better because he’s clearly not part of an organized group like the LNB.”

“How could you possibly know?” Ben asks.

I raise my eyebrows. “He seems incompetent, more like the guy who yells at you for crossing his lawn than part of something so organized.”

Ben scowls. “Don’t underestimate people like him. There’s a lot of anger and frustration in the world.”

Suze is visibly shaking. “Let’s get you home and call the police,” I say.

She nods jerkily, and I feel a wild sense of the unfairness in the world and the weight of my own guilt. Suze has suffered plenty, mostly thanks to her father, but I’ve played a role, too. I have secrets I’ve kept too long.

Is it too late to put them right? I think of Blue River Electric. That might be a way to begin.





THEN

I THINK I LOVE YOU





Phoebe

The Saturday before Thanksgiving, I was up before the sun, and by the time my dad had his first cigarette and cup of coffee, my suitcase was in the car. “Anxious to get to Amma’s?” he asked with a wink.

“Yes. My friend Suze and I have a lot of plans.”

He stroked his thick mustache, eyeing me over the curling blue smoke of his L&M cigarette.

“You need to make friends here,” my mom said, bustling into the kitchen. She wore her silky robe, belted tight around her middle, and a pair of mules with feathers on the top. Her toenails and fingernails were red. She poured a cup of coffee. “What about the girls you had over to swim?”

I rolled my eyes to cover the intense embarrassment that still burned in me over that night. If she thought I was contemptuous, it was better than if she felt sorry for me. “Not everyone needs a million friends,” I said.

“Not a million,” my mother said in her direct way. “A couple would be fine.”

“Mom!”

“I’m saying that maybe if you reached out and tried to be friendlier, you’d have more friends, more of a social life.”

“Like you?” I shot back, because really all she did was work and have cocktails with her lawyer friends.

It was impossible to get her mad, though, and she raised an eyebrow. “I’m allowing the Thanksgiving week trip, but you are not going to spend the entire Christmas break in the back of beyond, hiding from your life.”

“Lilly,” my dad said mildly, lifting a hand. “Leave her alone.”

“Maybe Suze can come here,” I said.

“But—” My mother shook her head. “Phoebe, I hate to say it, but that girl is strange. All that hair, her weird clothes.”

“Oh, I’m sure! Don’t be so judgmental, Mom!” Heat pulsed in the hollow of my throat. “That’s not her, it’s her dad. He won’t let her cut her hair and makes her wear those clothes so that boys don’t look at her.”

“I’m sure it works,” my mother muttered.

I shoved my chair back with a loud scrape and said to my dad, “I’ll be in the car.”



With every mile between us and Portland, tension slid away from my neck and shoulders. It wasn’t just Suze. It was going toward my grandmother and the studio where we would spend our time painting, and the beach and tide pools and the taste of the air. My parents fought all the time lately, and not hearing their furious, low voices would be a relief all by itself.

Watching fog-draped pine trees swish by the car windows, I asked my dad, “Why did you leave Blue Cove? It’s so much better than Portland.”

He took a breath. “Well, kiddo, it doesn’t have a lot of opportunities for a guy like me. I was never going to be a fisherman or a hotel manager. I wanted to read books for a living.” He winked at me. “Now I do.”

“Couldn’t you have taught high school English?”

“I could have,” he said, “but to tell you the truth, I didn’t want to. From the first time I found out you could live at college as a professor, there wasn’t another damned thing I wanted.” He reached for my hand on the seat. “They call that a vocation. And knowing what you’re supposed to do for work is one of the best things that can happen to a person.”

It was the first time I’d ever heard this idea. “When did you figure it out?”

“Pretty much the day I walked onto the campus, freshman year.”

I nodded. Looked back to the trees, trying to imagine what my vocation would be. “I used to think I wanted to be a marine biologist,” I said. “I like tide pools and the ocean, but that’s a lot of science.”

“Mmm.”

“And then I thought it might be that I wanted to be an architect, because houses are so cool.”

“They are,” he agreed.

“I’m drawing a comic book in art class,” I told him. “Maybe I could be an artist?”

“That’s not surprising. You are so good at drawing and painting.”

I tried to imagine what it would be like to spend my days in a studio, painting all the time. “Maybe a comic book writer,” I added.

“Cool.”

This was what I loved about my dad. My mother would start arguing for architecture, for being sensible, even though it was years and years until I had to decide. My dad let me be . . . me.

As we descended from the mountains, following switchbacks through the forest, my heart felt as light as it ever did. I could breathe. “I hate my school,” I said.

“I’ve been kind of getting that.” He paused, looking in the rearview mirror, then at me. “Do you think it’s the school or the stage of your life you’re in? Junior high is always pretty cutthroat.”

“No one likes me.”

“I don’t believe that’s true at all. Why do you think that, sweetheart?”

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