I pushed her away. “Is this a joke? Early April Fools’? Ha-ha? It’s not funny.”
Tears ringed Mom’s eyes; she wiped them away with the back of her hand. “We don’t know the details yet. Something happened during a training exercise, and Warren’s been injured. He’s at Martin Army Community Hospital. Your father and I are flying to Georgia as soon as we get tickets.”
“I’m going too,” I said. My heart was pounding. I felt each beat in my throat and nearly choked on them.
Mom shook her head. “I’m sorry, Ozzie, but you can’t miss school.”
Dad hung up the phone. “Okay. We’re flying out of Miami, but we’ve got to leave now if we’re going to make it.”
Everything was happening too fast. “I don’t care about school!” I said. “I want to go with you.”
“Listen, Oz,” Dad said. “I’ll call the realtor and explain what’s happened, and I’ll hire movers to finish packing.”
“Do you think you can stay with Lua while we’re gone?” Mom asked.
I shook my head. They weren’t listening to me. “Yeah, but—”
“Good,” Mom said. “I don’t know when we’ll be back, but I’ll call you as soon as we know how Renny is.”
Dad had grabbed an armful of clothes and threw them into his duffel bag. I wasn’t even sure he knew what he was packing.
“You’re not leaving me behind,” I said.
Dad zipped his bag shut. “We don’t have time to argue about this, Ozzie. You’re not going, and you’re not staying here alone. Go to Lua’s house and I’ll call her mother on the way to the airport. Understand?”
I didn’t know what else to say, and they didn’t give me the time to compose an argument. Before I could process what was happening, they were out the door and gone.
? ? ?
I didn’t drive to Lua’s house. Not right away. I went to Calvin’s instead. I showed up on his front step crying, and he didn’t ask why. He just hugged me until I stopped. Eventually we wound up at the beach, sitting in the sand, watching the tides roll out. It was weird that there were still tides without the moon to push and pull them.
Calvin probably had a million questions, but he kept them to himself. We sat beside each other, my head on his shoulder, until the light in the sky faded. I didn’t know where that came from either, nor did I care.
“I never really saw the stars before,” Calvin said out of the blue.
I’d been thinking about Warren, about how stupid he’d been to join the army. He didn’t belong there. He wasn’t a fighter or a killer. He was just a stupid kid who didn’t know what else to do with his life. And then Cal brought up the stars. I’d tried to explain them to him after they disappeared, but I don’t think he really understood what they were. Even the word sounded foreign when he said it.
“What?”
“The stars,” Cal said. “I don’t think I ever saw them.”
I shook my head. “You don’t remember them, that’s all.”
“No . . . I mean, yeah, I don’t remember them, but I think that even when I could remember them, I must not have seen them. Not really.” He shivered in the cool air. “I think the sky was always empty to me.”
I wasn’t in the mood for one of Calvin’s philosophical discussions. Half the time I didn’t understand what he was saying anyway. Moments like that, I thought he and Tommy would have liked each other.
If they’d met before Tommy and I had, they might have fallen in love and I’d never have known either of them.
“That thing I told you,” Calvin said. “About being baptized? It wasn’t true.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Yeah it does.” Calvin was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “I did nearly drown, and God did speak to me and tell me I could breathe underwater, but it didn’t happen at the beach, and I definitely wasn’t being baptized. It started on a boat—his boat. He’d given me beer. I was a little tipsy and I fell over the side. He laughed at me because he thought it was funny, and maybe it was, but I sank beneath the surface and didn’t float back up. I thought if I let the air out of my lungs and drifted to the bottom of the ocean, everything would be different.”
“Cal, I don’t—”
“But God told me to breathe, so I breathed. And then he hauled me out of the water.”
“God?”
“Coach Reevey.”
I pulled away from Cal to look him in the eyes. “Your wrestling coach? He’s the teacher you were sleeping with?”
Calvin nodded. “I thought he loved me, but then he said he’d found someone new. That I wasn’t special anymore.”
“You have to tell someone,” I said. “Your dad or a guidance counselor. Anyone.”
“He called me to his office last week.” Calvin kept talking like he hadn’t heard me. No one, it seemed, was listening to me today. “Told me he was sorry. That he could help me get into college if I . . .”
“If you what? Did he do something to you again?”
Calvin’s voice cracked. He buried his face in his hands. “The pills he gave me, he said they’d relax me. But then he’d do things to me, and I couldn’t stop him. My brain would scream at me to fight back, but my body just couldn’t.”
“My brother’s hurt, and he might die. Why are you telling me this now?”
“Because you deserve to know.”
“Listen, Cal. What Coach Reevey did to you isn’t your fault. We can tell someone and they’ll fire him or arrest him or something. But it’s not your fault.”
“The funny thing is,” Calvin said, “I thought I’d been breathing underwater this whole time, but I guess I’ve been drowning.”
I stood and brushed the sand off the back of my shorts. “I can’t do this, Calvin. I can’t. Not with my brother . . . not with Renny hurt.”
“I know. I’m sorry. You deserve better than me.”
“Better than you? Who’s better than you, Cal?”
Calvin shrugged. “Everyone.”
TOMMY
MY PHONE RINGS. ITS DISTANT chimes bore through my dreams and manifest as thunderous peals from the stars. Each one a different note in the heavens that flares when it sounds. I reach out, try to touch them, but they’re so distant. And then they fall silent.
My phone rings again, and this time I pull the stars from the sky. My hands ignite and burn sapphire blue. My skin melts and drips to the sand, my bones char and turn to ash. But I hold on to the sound. I unspool it and follow it out of the dream.
“Hello?” My voice is groggy.
“Ozzie?”
Tommy’s voice clears the sleepy fog, and I check my hands to make sure they’re not burned. I still remember the pain. I sit up in bed, glance at my alarm clock; it’s 3:03 a.m.
“Tommy? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he says. “I just needed to hear your voice.” He’s lying, I always know when Tommy’s lying, but I also hear other voices in the background. Yelling.
“Your dad?”
Tommy grunts. “They shut off our water. Pops blew the bill money on booze.”