Stardust

Meteor Eyes

Stardust: Meteor Eyes

Jake Gallagher

    Today began just like any other...

    Who was I kidding?

    I found myself on the floor of my bedroom. The window was wide open, oscillating on its screeching hinges that sounded remotely familiar to what I imagined the soundtrack of my death to be like. The heat that slithered into my room was so corpulent that it rivaled the fire of a thousand suns, and I could almost see the steam clouding around my head (or maybe it was coming out of my head) as a war raged on between my conscience and my mouth.

    Every now and again, I would glance at my phone, and the little man that lived inside of my head whose voice was strident enough to echo in every corner of my mind would shout at me to call Anessa. But every time I touched the dial pad, my lips went numb and I thought I lost all sensibility to articulate anything besides an incoherent string of sobs.

    I dragged myself into Skylar's empty corner, burying my face in the pillowcase that still reveled in the scent of him. The smell was faint and sweet, like the sugary aroma of opening a new box of cereal. I enjoyed a ceasefire when my thoughts became overrun with constellations in the shape of him.

    After the trauma I was subjected to the night prior, I knew I would wake up with either the incontrovertible urge to hurt myself or someone else, but I decided that I didn't have the heart for that, so I sat there and I brooded and brooded some more.

    I had hoped that being in Skylar's presence could ease some of the distress that plagued every second of my being awake, but I woke up at three o'clock in the morning to find my window open and not a trace of Skylar in sight. A part of me hadn't expected him to stay; after all, he didn't last time, and I blamed that on my life being founded upon a series of seemingly ill-starred incidents — especially last night's wreck.

    I always thought of parents being every child's moral compass. Accordingly, I never thought I would question my own parents' sense of right and wrong. Mom frequently stressed the idea of there always being a gray area, but knowing that my own father was capable of being unfaithful made me want to shove him into a vat of black paint.

    My head became filled with all of these horrible scenarios so vivid that my skull no longer had room for my eyes. Every night he said he had to work late, was he with another woman? Every time he missed a PTA meeting or cancelled on a day at the park with me, was he spending his time with the child of one of his other lovers? Was he wearing the ring Mom bought him for their ten-year anniversary when he was screwing some floozy because he sure as hell was wearing his wedding ring to Anessa when he was groping my mother on the kitchen counter.

     Thinking about it in that moment as I laid on my bedroom floor filled to the brim with a disgust so absolute I never thought I would feel anything else ever again, I realized that I never did know why Mom and Dad broke up. It was very sudden. One day, they were planning a romantic getaway for two, and the next day Dad was packing up his things and telling us he was "going away for awhile."

    The more I dwelled on it, the more doubt pooled inside of me like a murky swamp infested with parasites and bloodsuckers.

    Last night, after creeping back into my room in a haze of perpetual shock, I sat in the middle of my bed pondering — sparing a series of glances at Skylar — about all the different possibilities that led to the end of my parents' seventeen-year courtship. Mostly, I thought that Mom may have found out that Dad was cheating, but she was too selfless to tell us kids and consequently tarnish the golden pedestal we put him on, so she swallowed her pride and addressed everything with a bright ray of optimism. But that was not OK. We deserved to know, and by we I meant Owen, Levi and me. We were and are old enough to understand. No child should find out that their dad is a cheating bastard in the way that I found out. I was sure there would be a deep, red, proverbial scar etched into my psyche for the rest of my life.

    There was a quiet one-two-three on my bedroom door. I groaned, lolling over and ending up halfway beneath my bed. I contemplated not giving any sign of life at all until the miserable cretin banging on the walls of my conscience sniggered, "Well, are yeh gonna answer that or do I have to come out and do it myself?"

    At the start of another sequence of three, I got fed up and hollered, "If you're not Cassie, then go away!"

    My door creaked open. I expected to hear the excited squalls of toddlerhood after a good nap, but instead it was the girlish laughter of the second to last person I wanted to see.

    "Darling," my mother cooed, her voice dripping like honeyed cud that, on this particular day, rendered me nauseous, "why are you laying on the floor?"

    I snorted. "I'm practicing dying."

    "Why?"

    I sat up, my elbows propped on my knees and a face full of repugnance. "Because I suffer from the terminal disease of having a guilty conscience. Obviously, it's not genetic."

    Her eyebrows furrowed as her thin frame leaned against my doorway, arms folded over her paint-stained T-shirt. "Baby, are you mad at me?"

    "What gave it away?" I seethed. "My sudden affinity for death, or the fact that I'm clearly suffering from the second-hand shame your presence is giving me?"

    Her voice raised an octave like it did whenever she was upset over one of her favorite contestants getting their torch snuffed on Survivor. "Why are you mad at me, sweetie? Was it something I said? I notice Skylar isn't here; did I do something to upset him?"

    I pulled myself from the floor, dusting off my jeans and preparing to make a swift exit once I've said my peace; or, rather, hit her with a verbal hand grenade.

    "Because I caught you making out with Dad in the kitchen last night," I hissed.

    "So?" she shrugged, some of her wispy blonde hairs falling from her bun and fluttering over her shoulders. "What's the big deal?"

    "What's the big deal?!" I snapped. "HE'S MARRIED!"

    She waved her hand dismissively as if this was the most ridiculous conversation she had ever engaged in. For me, it was; I never thought I would be reprimanding my own mother.

    "He's only been married for a few months, dear," she said, "and he's barely been with that woman for a year. Plus, I had him first. Being with him for almost seventeen years has to count for something."

    I was sure a blood vessel popped in my eye.

    "Do you know how childish you sound?! This isn't high school where the loose cheerleaders fight over the quarterback! This is real life! It doesn't matter if you had him first; that doesn't void the fact that he is a married man! And since this isn't high school and you're not a promiscuous cheerleader, you're like the" — I paused to rattle my brain for a real-world equivalent — "the slutty secretary!"

    Only to re-enforce my proclamation of her immaturity, she stopped her foot and she whined, "I am not! You take that back!"

    "FINE!" I howled. "You're the dirty mistress!"

    "I am no such thing! I am a respectable women who-"

    "Bullshit!" I snapped.

    Her eyes nearly bugged out of her skull. "Watch your mouth, Jacoby John Gallagher!"

    She only referred to me by my full name when she was very upset with me — which only happened, maybe, three times in my entire life — but at this point I was too livid to care.

    I scoffed. "What? Do you want me to take my freakin' eyes out and turn 'em around?"

    That line was a personal best for me.

    Her following gasp was so shrill that I thought the eardrums of every child in the tri-state area had just burst. "Why - you," she huffed, so angry that she was at a loss for words, "I - you... AH!"

    "Goodbye, Mother," I spat, shoving passed her frame shaking with the fumes of today's wreck.

    I clunked down the stairs with a heart heavy enough to crash through the floor and into the basement. The pictures of a once-happy family of a mother, father, and three smiling sons rattled in their frames along the wall beside the stairs. I fought off the nearly irrefutable urge to smash each glass overlay into jagged, shark tooth-shards and carve out the faces of my parents. I imagined myself superimposing the faces of perfect parents, like you see in the commercials for swanky new family vehicles with the beautiful soccer mom and the doting father, over the gaping holes like bullet wounds where I cut out my actual parents.

    "Where yeh goin'?" Levi inquired from his perch on the back of the couch where he and Owen were in the midst of an intense battle of Mortal Kombat. A satanic voice roared FINISH HIM from the television and what I assumed to be Levi's character landed a blow that threw Owen's character off of the screen. Owen slammed his heel into one of the couch cushions.

    "I don't know yet," I seethed, but once I reached the landing I cupped my hands around my mouth and howled up the stairs, "HOWEVER, I DO KNOW THAT MOM AND DAD ARE GOING TO H-E DOUBLE HOCKEY STICKS!"

    I elected to use the closest acronym to hell as I possibly could despite the storm of anger brewing in my head considering that Cassie may have been listening and her latest tendency — other than simultaneously pooping whenever she got excited — was parroting me.

    "They're going to a hockey game?" Levi gasped in ignorant excitement. "Can I go?!"

    Owen sighed, slapping a palm to his own forehead. "He means they're going to hell, idiot."

    "Oh," Levi frowned, "then I don't wanna go."

    I slammed the front door and the Christmas wreath fell on the welcome mat, sequentially being flattened by the stomp of my heel. My Grandma made that wreath by hand over a decade ago. She used almost half a spool of pine garland, red beads that resembled holly berries if you squinted hard enough, and in the middle, hanging above the convolutedly fancy letters of Merry Christmas, was my infantile pacifier. The pressure of my heel sent the nipple of the pacifier bouncing down the porch steps. I knew my mother would be devastated, and the nagging man inside my conscience was guilty that I actually smiled at the notion of her being upset, but I reasoned it necessary to my mental health and figured I would save the regret for later.

    I sat in the middle of the sidewalk in front of my house. I had never smoked before, but I felt like I needed a cigarette. Instead, I sifted threw my pockets for my phone. There was only one person I wanted to see, but considering that he had a home phone without service thanks to his mother prioritizing booze over bills, I had to play the game call-everyone-in-your-contacts-until-someone-knew-where-Skylar-was.

    I called Brennyn first. It went straight to voice mail and I assumed it was because she hardly ever charged her phone. It was the same with Shannyn, but I knew she was chatting with one of her many prospective boyfriends. Matt was next on the list. He sounded disappointed when I asked if he knew where Skylar was — he responded with Oh. Nonetheless, he told me he would call if he heard anything. Then it was Leah, but she was stuck with the duty of babysitting her younger cousins and their cries rushed her off the phone before she could give me a definitive answer. I even got desperate enough to call Andrea Alvarez whose exact words were If I knew where Skylar was, I'd be fucking him right now before she hung up on me. It took every ounce of willpower I had not to redial and call her a whore.

    There was only one person left to call, but I knew that if he had already smoked his daily joint that he would have me on the phone for hours discussing his almost alien abduction and the meaning of life that was only philosophical to someone as equally high as, if not higher than, Ethan Marshall.

    There was only a half of a ring before I could nearly smell the marijuana emanating from the other end of the phone call.

    "YO, YO, J-DIZZLE!" Ethan hollered. His voice was overwhelmed by the crinkling of what sounded like tin foil.

    I sighed. On any other day I would have hung up upon the realization that he was absolutely stoned, but I really wanted to see Skylar, and so I knew I had to play along if this conversation was going to go in the direction I wanted it to.

    "Hey, Eazy-E," I said, trying my best to be chipper, but I was sure I sounded like I had just been punched in the eye with a cactus. "I hope you're steering clear of any crop circles!"

    "Man," he gasped, "you wouldn't believe the shit I saw in the field the other day..."

    Ethan veered off into a tangent about seeing a German Shepard with the skin of a snake wandering through the wheat field on the other side of town. He was adamant about it being an alien, but I knew it was just another one of his bizarre, drug-fueled hallucinations just like the story he told me about the dancing newborn he saw when he took his older brother to the hospital for getting his dick stuck in a bottle.

    "Oh, yeah, the stars are totally UFOs in disguise," I sighed. I was mentally exhausted after the twenty-minute tirade on interspecific hybrids and their corresponding relationships (he was one-hundred percent convinced that an alien mated with a German Shepard to produce whatever he supposedly saw in the wheat field).

    "Anyway," I chirped, "do you, by any chance, know where Skylar is?"

    "Fuck yeah," Ethan proclaimed as if the throw-away cuss word had a special meaning. Perhaps to him, tangled in the web of his inebriated stupor, it did. "He's kickin' it with me and Bonnie."

    I arched an eyebrow. "Bonnie?"

    I felt a hammer in my chest at the possibility of Skylar being interested by someone else. Every time I thought of him with another person, I felt like a dog whose pissed-on territory was being invaded. I hoped that Bonnie was a lesbian or, if not, I hoped she wasn't as nice as Leah because then I'd feel bad for not liking her.

    "Bonnie," Ethan sniggered, "otherwise known as my bong."

    "Oh," I chuckled, my cheeks taking on the shade of a fire hydrant in the mid-summer sun. "In that case, can I talk to him?"

    "Fo' shizzle!"

    There was a deadened fumble from the other end of the call, and then a series of throaty coughs    before Skylar's newly gruff voice floated through the line. "Hey, what's up?"

    My voice had taken on a whiny pitch. I didn't want to sound needy — I never wanted him to think I was that person — but it was either whine or cry, but for some reason I didn't feel safe enough to cry.

     "I need someone to take to," I groaned. "It's serious."

    "Alright," he said, almost down to a whisper lost in the midst of the chaos of the world. But that single word only audible to me was spoken as comfortingly and carefully as I'd ever heard. "Meet me at Mark's Place Liquor Store on my side of town."

    There was a click and then the dial tone buzzed in my head like crickets on an August night. I flipped my phone closed. I sat there for awhile staring at all the passing cars blasting some rock band or rapper, and the kids down the street riding their bikes with the training wheels still on, and the old couple next door sharing loving smiles while they tended to their garden of cornflowers and marigolds and morning glories. All the while, I thought of Skylar and my parents, and then I thought of Cassie and how I wished I could be as ignorant and happy as her. I was too young to be this tired of the world and everyone in it... everyone except for Skylar; the guy who would never love me as much as I loved him. Then all the cars and people and bikes and flowers looked very gray, and I didn't remember walking to the highway that was so quiet that it was out of place — it felt like that split second of silence when driving beneath a bridge on a rainy Sunday.

☆   ☪   ☆

    Mark's Place was closed. I cupped my hands around my eyes and peered into the window. It was too dark inside to make out anything except the shelves that jutted into the shadows like miniature castles. There was a thin film of dust on the glass of the window, and I thought that maybe the quaint little liquor store on the corner in the middle of that malodorous, downtrodden section of the city would never be open again. I could relate to that; I hopelessly thumbed-away a smudge of dirt from the glass.

    I sat on the curb in front of the store, staring into all the window's of the businesses and for-rent buildings across the noisome four-lane street buzzing with noon traffic. I could see my small reflection in the window of the pharmacy who had been broken into far too many times to catalog. I looked lost. I supposed I looked how I felt. I knew where I was geographically, but in terms of psychology, I had no idea. I wasn't even sure if I was mad anymore. It was like I was stuck between two stations with some form of clarity on either platform, but I just can't reach anything. So, I pulled my knees to my chest and willed myself to feel something — anything — else.

    It was only when Skylar, the rugged and perpetually frowning stick of a man who collected my heart as a casualty in a possibly extensive collection, rounded the corner beside Mark's Place that I did feel something. My eyes began to leak like loose faucets and my lips quivered violently. I had felt the urge to burst into a geyser since the previous night, but it was only with Skylar that I felt safe enough to do so.

    Skylar plopped down beside me on the curb, his long legs awkwardly folded in front of him and the faint aroma of marijuana emanating from the attire that shaded him in black from head to toe.

    "Please don't cry," he whispered, his breathing as consistent as the ticking of a clock, "it makes me feel bad 'cause I don't know what to do to make you feel better."

    I petulantly swatted at my tear-stained cheeks. "You being here is enough," I muttered.

    He bumped his knee against mine, and I knew I was safe to say all — or almost all — of the things I wanted to say. I only ever needed someone to talk to without having to condense my feelings to make way for whatever problems might have plagued the person I choose to confide in, but I didn't want to exchange sob stories. I wanted to be selfish; I wanted someone to listen without talking, and Skylar had become that someone for me.

    "Last night," I said between the odd interjections of sniffles, "after you went to sleep, I found my parents making out in the kitchen."

    His shoulder brushed mine; a silent permit to elaborate.   

    "It's like, parents are supposed to teach you right and wrong," I said. "They're supposed to discipline you, and prepare you with a set of morals to carry with you for the rest of your life. So, how can parents be such hypocrites?

    "And not only that, but what gives my father the right to do that? He's the one that left after seventeen years, and he's the one that's off playing house with his new wife and stepdaughter, so what the hell right does he have to play these games with my mom's heart? Do you know how many nights she's stayed up at ungodly hours just to stare at the television that Dad bought almost a decade ago? And when she does, I know she's thinking about all the times that they would drink wine to be as fancy as the people they saw on drama shows, and how they always wrestled for power of what movie we'd watch, and when Dad would tinker with the TV for hours to restore the channels after a power outage. She does it every night! Every goddamn night I hear the static of the television slithering up the stairs, and I feel this anger swell inside of me that she's still so in love with my father and he doesn't even care about her feelings because he's off playing the role of the perfect husband to a woman that he hasn't even known for a year!"

    By that point, my voice had risen an octave — much like my mother's — and the pace of my heart quickened to that of a firefly's wings beating against the glass of a jar. I began to feel like my sentences were no longer connecting, like they were fragments stolen from other conversations — or maybe my sentences were connecting so much so that they bled together without the necessary pauses to define each one as an individual thought. I couldn't make up my mind.

    "And what's even worse is that she — Anessa — is a really great woman and she deserves all the happiness in the world, and it's unfair that her husband still feels some sort of way towards his ex-common-law-wife! God, just imagine how Anessa would feel if she ever found out? She would think that she was nothing more than a rebound or a midlife crisis... And think about the kids! What example is all of this setting for Owen, Levi, Cassie and Jael — do whatever the hell you want because everything you've ever learned about virtues and ethics is complete bull crap, and, hey, you can even murder someone or mug an old lady 'cause apparently that's OK too?!

    "I mean, what's wrong with my dad?! I'm beginning to think that he either has a complete disregard for the feelings of everyone around him — like he's some sort of sociopath — or that maybe there's some vital part of the story that I seem to be missing."

    Tears slid down my cheeks in corpulent drops that fell onto the pavement where they mingled with the trash stuck to the curb. In that moment I wished I could crawl into the storm drain and never come out.

    Skylar propped his chin on my shoulder, his eyes gliding along my face like brilliant golden meteors across the sky. And — as if that were the only way to speak — he whispered, "Maybe he's still learning."

    I sighed. I really wanted Skylar to be on my side. I wanted him to share my opinions and feel the same range of emotions I felt about the situation... but I knew that Skylar had this inherent goodness in him to understand the reasons for why people did what they did, and a part of me really hated that. I didn't want to listen to excuses; I just wanted there to be a black and a white; a right and a wrong. I didn't want there to be a gray area, but Skylar's entire existence seemed to be an intermediate space in time. But what bothered me most was how Skylar — in just four measly words — could make me empathize with my father despite my spiel of morality.

    Skylar suddenly shot up off the curb. He towered over me, his shadow swallowing me whole. "Come on," he said, sticking his hand out to me, "I've got something to take your mind off of your parents' bullshit."

    I eyeballed his hand. "Are you gonna get me high?"

    "Not if you don't want to," he smirked. That arc of his mouth delivered me from hopelessness.

    I shook my head with the beginnings of a smile that would soon stretch my lips to their extremity. I took his hand. Honestly, I would follow Skylar anywhere; he had a power over me that could avert my eyes from the worst car crash. And I think he knew that.

☆   ☪   ☆

    Three blocks from Mark's Place, nestled between a dilapidated law firm and a car wash whose lot was littered with abandoned cars, was a small building drenched in a shade of vibrant red — sticking out like a sore thumb amongst the ordinary scenery of the city — called Taboo Tattoos. The namesake of the parlor was scrawled above the barred glass door in black graffiti; it was fitting to the fashion of the shop.

    The neon sign in the window, whose E failed to fluoresce, read CLOSED. Skylar briefly looked as if he would spit or swear. Then he grinned. He pulled a small something from his pocket and inserted it into the lock; he jigged it around for a moment until we heard a click. The door fell ajar.

    "Did you just break and enter?" I daftly gasped.

    "Well, I didn't break anything," he tossed me a smug glance over his shoulder, "but I'm entering."

    "What if we get arrested?" I whispered as if a squad of police would surround us with dogs and helicopters at any second — I'd seen far too many episodes of Cops. "I've never been arrested before."

    "Don't worry," Skylar shrugged, holding the door open for me to follow him inside, "I'll just say I kidnapped you and forced you to come with me."

    The air inside the shop smelled like a mixture of wet paint, magic markers, and the Royal Pine car freshener that I noticed dangling from a corner of the appointment counter in the middle of the room. The walls were as bright of a red as the outside of the building. Black and white tiles checkered the floor before transitioning into black carpeting beneath tattered leather chairs on the left side of the room. I had a feeling that Skylar spent many-a-days in those chairs.

    The windows let in an ample amount of light, but Skylar palmed along the wall until he found the nub of the light switch anyhow. The ceiling lights were dim, swallowed up by the sunlight penetrating the windows to the point that I couldn't tell what was natural and what was artificial.

    Skylar pointed to a wide, checkered hallway behind the counter. "They're always in the back," he said.

    I wanted to ask who they were, but I knew I would find out in the span of time that it took to take ten breaths, so I figured I'd just take the ten breaths.

    Only seven breaths later did we turn into the first doorless room in the hall. The room was held up by graffiti-littered walls that were once an institutional beige. In the corner sat a terrarium were an albino snake — one of my greatest fears — attempted to slither up the glass; I could have swore the red globules in place of its eyes were sucking my soul out of my mouth. In the epicenter of the room, huddled around the reclined tattoo chair, was a smorgasbord of hoodlums smoking cigarettes and sharing idle chit-chat about things that held no relevance to my life. A cloud of smoke hung above their heads. I noted one of them as the greasy-haired stoner with the affinity for spitballs that I shared detention with, and the other three I vaguely recognized as passerbys from the night Skylar and I went to his trailer park, what with the teardrop tattoos beneath their eyes, the sagging pants, and the thuggish aura encompassing them.

    It took about three strikes of the stoner's lighter for me to realize that one of us — Skylar or I — would be getting tattooed. I hoped it was Skylar. I wasn't mentally prepared for that.

    "'Sup, guys?" Skylar said.

    Every expression of every hoodlum looked utterly alarmed. The stoner dropped his cigarette. I assumed they hadn't heard us come in. But after a moment's pause, their gaped mouths stretched into smiles.

    "Sky, dude, what's up?" one of them greeted, bumping his fist against Skylar's.

    "My friend here," Skylar gestured to me; I awkwardly waved, "is getting his first tattoo."

    I squinted my eyes so much that my vision was reduced to two small slits only wide enough to see the base of Skylar's neck. "I'm doing what?"

    "Getting your first tattoo," Skylar said, speaking like a proud father at his son's first little league game. "Remember our very first conversation on the bleachers of the high school? I told you you'd want a tattoo eventually, but I've lost my patience, so that eventually is right now. Plus, it'll take your mind off your parent's bullshit."

    "Is this a prank?" I balked. "Where's Aston Kutcher?"

    My palms had begun to sweat profusely, and I self-consciously wiped them on my thighs every few seconds. I could actually feel my fight or flight response engaging. My better judgement insisted that I flee the premises like I had just ran from a burning building, but I knew Skylar was faster than me and that he would snatch me up before I even got out the door. So, instead, I stood there as if I had been diagnosed with paralysis. I willed myself to faint or vomit to give me an excuse not to be permanently branded with something that I knew I would regret in my later life, but nothing happened. I just looked constipated.

    "Nope," sniggered the stoner. He looked higher than the moon as he contorted his fingers into some symbol that I had only saw once in a gangster movie. "We're branding you with a gang sign."

    I almost burst into tears until Skylar backhanded him in the chest.

    "Shut the fuck up, Greg," Skylar spat, then turned to me. "We're not inkin' you with a gang sign. You can get whatever you want."

    "Stop pussyfootin' around," rumbled the muscular Mexican man — appearing no older than twenty-five — who had kneeled to coo at the snake. He walked in a few moments prior, but I was too horrified at the prospect of being carved with an ink-riddled needle to have taken notice of him. He stood at his full height, which wasn't much; maybe five-foot-eight at best. His hair, as dark as onyx, was slicked back with an unheard of amount of gel — much like John Travolta in Grease — and he wore a dark blue sweatshirt with the same graffiti logo of Taboo Tattoo that was proudly displayed on the shop front. In harshly bolded letters was the name Gonzo tattooed on the side of his neck.

    His dark eyes shot a glance in my direction. "Gonzalez," he said monotonously, pulling a pair of latex gloves that each made an audible snap over the Stay and Gold tattoos on the knuckles of his calloused, ink-stained hands, "but, as my new client, you'll call me Gonzo."

    I felt the urge to say Stay gold, Ponyboy, but I thought it best not to. He had probably received that same line on a hundred different occasions; probably so much that he had begun to hate the book that he obviously once loved enough to get a quote from tattooed in such a visible area.

    The pack of hoodlums cleared a path between myself and the tattoo chair. Skylar's hand found its way to the small of my back, guiding me forward. The five-foot walk from the doorway to the chair felt like I had traveled it in slow motion. It was only when Skylar gently pushed me into the seat that things began to move in real-time again. I could almost taste the warmth radiating from the leather. I traced every imperfection of the material beneath me with my fingertips, and I wondered if I was touching the stain of someone's blood or vomit. I shuddered at the thought.

    "What do you want?" Skylar asked. A tinge of giddiness peaked in his tone. He sounded like a kid in a candy store trying to dial back his excitement to retain his cool demeanor in front of his friends.

    "I don't know," I shrugged. "I never thought about it."

    "C'mon," Greg groaned, "there's gotta be somethin' you've always wanted."

    I frowned. "Right now, I just wanna puke."

    "Everything's gonna be fine," Skylar chuckled, his eyes resembling chunks of stained glass, "you're not gonna die."

    "But what if I do?" I whined. "What if I'm allergic to the ink or something?"

    Skylar shook his head. "Have you ever written on yourself with a pen?"

    I nodded.

    "Did you die?"

    "No," I said in a small voice.

    "Then you're not allergic," he asserted.

    Gonzo rolled over to me in a wheeled stool. With him was a tray that he placed on the table beside me. An assortment of colorful inks were spread across the tray in little cups that almost resembled the remnants of a shattered kaleidoscope. He began tinkering with the tattoo gun, of which caught my attention like Norman Bates charging at me with a butcher knife.

    "Think of something that means a lot to you," Gonzo said, "and that's what your tattoo will be."

    I racked my brain for something that had a meaning paramount enough to have it punctured into my skin. The first thing that came to mind was Cassie. I contemplated getting her name on my arm, but I figured that people might mistake that for a girlfriend's name, so I tossed that idea — along with my sanity for even considering getting a tattoo — out the window. I attempted to searched the room for any ideas, but my eyes only seemed to avert back and forth between the graffiti on the walls — only because of how purely obnoxious it was — and Skylar.

    In the moment that followed, I reached one of the proverbial stations of clarity I had pondered earlier that day. I stared at Skylar, taking in every detail of him like he was as rare and fleeting as seeing Halley's Comet. The glow of a lighter highlighted the way the left side of his mouth slightly tilted up in a perpetual smirk. How his hair fell across his eyes and how effortlessly absolute it was. His bottom lip's scar, stopping precisely were the pink met the white. The way he breathed so remissly, as if his heart would stop at any moment. The golden sunbursts shooting like comets through his copper irises. And, inside each perfect black pool of his pupils, the reflection of the night I spent with Skylar in the field.

    Even more so, upon the existence of that clarity, I perceived all the things that made him Skylar. He's an asteroid; beautiful and absolutely terrifying. He's a planet; so alive and larger than life. He's the moon and all of its phases; a side to him always hidden in shadows... or maybe he's the sun; leaving behind rays of light in every life he's ever touched. He's all the stars arranged into limitless constellations in the shape of every magnificent thought he's ever had. But, more than all else, he's everything to me. He's every star and every planet and every satellite. He means the universe to me.

    I knew what I wanted.

    "I want," I averted my eyes to Gonzo, "stars."

    I could see the white of Skylar's teeth from the side of my eye.

    "Any particular reason?" Gonzo asked in that same monotone voice of his.

    "It's a tribute to one of my favorite memories," I muttered, "and my favorite person."

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    "That was as bad as the time my cousin, Jenson, hit me in the back of the head with his T-ball bat when we were six," I said.

    Since we entered Taboo Tattoos, the street had become shrouded in the scent of the dubious taco stand down the street. The high-noon sun bore into our skins outside of the parlor. The clear bandage over my left wrist caught the sunlight. Beneath the bandage, the cluster of ten black stars in a row of descending sizes were sore, swollen and encompassed by patches of red skin.

    "It itches," I groaned. "Can I scratch it?"

    The breeze frayed Skylar's hair as he lit a cigarette. Curlicues of smoke lifted around his head. I was almost tempted to ask if I could try it, but I remembered the poster of the man with a trachea in my ninth-grade health class, and so I abandoned the thought.

    "No, you'll ruin the ink," Skylar said. "Just try to ignore it."

    I snorted. "Easy for you to say, Mister I-Have-Thirty-Seven-Tattoos."

    At first I had found myself astounded at the number — there certainly didn't appear to be that many designs splayed across his body. But as I latched onto Skylar's arm while Gonzo jabbed at my wrist, I began to count each little design and I was even more astounded that there were indeed thirty-four indelible marks flowing like rivulets of spilled paint across the canvas of his skin. I pondered the locations of the other three; my mind fell face-first into the gutter.

    "You're a new man," Skylar muttered around the cigarette that dangled from his lips like an Autumn leaf threatening to drift away on the breeze, "so what do you wanna do first?"

    I shrugged. "I don't know. I still feel like the same old Jake."

    "C'mon," he said, nudging my shoulder, "there's gotta be somethin' you wanna do."

    I grinned. "Wanna go snort some coke?"

    A deep, wholehearted laugh shot through Skylar like an electric current. "You're not ruining your life on my watch."

    "My life will be ruined anyway once my parents see this," I said, running a finger across the bandage. "So, I guess I wanna show it off before my father tries to scrub the skin off my wrist with a wire brush."

    Skylar took a long pull on his cigarette. A trail of smoke lingered around his nose. "Who's the first lucky person to see your ink?"

    "You," I chuckled, "but I haven't seen Matt in awhile. I suppose the second lucky person will be Matt."

    Skylar nodded, flicking the butt of his cigarette into the street. Just as quickly as he abandoned the last, Skylar drew another cigarette from the withered packet in his pants' pocket, to which I imagined my grandfather calling Skylar a hellion and telling him to quit defiling God's clean air with those devilish fumes. Curiosity ebbed through the blue lobes of my brain, and I couldn't help but to ask him why he smoked.

    He gave me a thoughtful look; his eyes squinted and a crease between his brows. He focused that stare on the spot between my eyes. The golden sunbursts of his irises looked ever brighter in that moment, and he said, "Because it's a more honorable form of suicide."

    He took another long drag on his cigarette and smiled. "To Matty's house it is."

☆   ☪   ☆

    Matt looked unambiguously shocked to find Skylar and me standing on his porch on a Friday afternoon. I supposed that I should have called — Matt was still in his pajamas, consisting of a white t-shirt now corrupted by a stain from his breakfast burrito and a pair of shorts dotted with DC Comics superheroes. His hair stood on end, as if he hand stuck a fork in a wall socket, and he repeatedly rubbed his eyes.

    "What're you guys doing here?" Matt asked, his mouth agape and his braced teeth catching reflections of the sunlight in blinding shards.

    Skylar smirked, squeezing passed Matt and into the house. "Lookin' good, Tremaine."

    "Shut up," Matt grumbled.

    I squeezed in the doorway as well, and Matt smiled.

    Skylar wandered his way into the sitting room while he puffed away on his cigarette as if he were afraid to breathe anything that he couldn't see. He flopped himself on Matt's parents' leather couch that still faintly retained the scent of the furniture store.

    The only time I had been to Matt's house was Halloween night when he, Ethan and I returned from The House of the Breathing Corpses. The lights were out, and so we stumbled our way up the stairs and into Matt's bedroom by the glow of my cellphone's screen. Now, bathed in the light of day that shone through the lace curtains, I could see how truly immaculate Mrs. Tremaine kept the state of her house. Matt told me his mother had slight OCD, but I would have never thought that every inch of the house would have been polished so diligently that everything had an ethereal glow. Even the wood of the fireplace had a certain divinity that made each log appear as though it were carved from unblemished stone.

    "Get your shoes off the couch," Matt said, shoving Skylar's worn soles onto the floor, "or my mother will kill you."

    "Nah," Skylar grunted, "I'd put up a fight, and the last thing Mrs. T would want is to have to scrub blood stains outta her carpet."

    Matt folded his thin legs into a pretzel in his father's recliner. "Stop smoking in here," he huffed, swatting at the curlicues lifting around the sitting room.

    Skylar shrugged, his lips arcing into that flagrant smirk, and then he snuffed out the cherry of his cigarette on the underside of Mrs. Tremaine's mahogany coffee table.

    Matt screamed like the archetypical bimbo in horror films.

    "Chill out," Skylar chuckled, shoving the remains of the cigarette in his pocket. "It's not like she'll notice."

    Matt's head resembled an inflated blowfish. "You're so lucky my parents aren't home right now!"

    I could feel the mutual annoyance as they stared at each, a telepathic war raging on between them. I wondered how the two of them were so-called best friends if they couldn't even have a decent conversation without one of them antagonizing the other. I guessed that was just one of the many incomprehensible dynamics of their relationship. Nonetheless, I sat on the coffee table between them as a precautionary measure.

    "So," I chirped, averting both of their gazes to me, "are you and your dad talking yet, Matt?"

    "Well, he asked me to pass him the gravy during Thanksgiving dinner yesterday. Usually, he'd walk around the whole table and get it himself, so I guess we're making progress," he said before repositioning a glare on the lounging Skylar, "no thanks to Sky."

    Skylar mumbled something quietly enough that neither Matt nor I could hear the words so much as his irritation. Then he buried his face in the leather cushion.

    Matt rolled his eyes. "Anyway," he said, "what's that on your wrist, Jake?"

    I smiled very broadly, and I'm sure it looked misplaced in consideration to the tension that thickened the air of the sitting room. "Skylar got me a tattoo," I said.

    Matt unfolded himself from the recliner and plopped down beside me on the coffee table. He brought my wrist to his face. His breath rippled the plastic of the bandage. Then he smiled.

    "It's really cool," he said — I could smell the suggestion of spearmint on his tongue. "How come you never took me to get a tattoo, Sky?"

    Skylar lifted his face from the suffocation of the cushion. "You never showed an interest," he deadpanned. Then he launched from the couch with an urgency.

    "What?" I asked, almost getting up from the coffee table.

    "Gotta piss," he mumbled before darting out of the room and up the spiral staircase. He left a path of cigarette scent in his wake.

    I felt Matt stifle a chuckle beside me. "There's been two other times where he's taken off through my house like that. The first time, I caught him smoking a joint in the bathroom, and the second time was when I found him making out with my older sister."

    I laughed, staring after the imaginative trail of smoke and stars that Skylar left wherever he walked. I wondered what he was doing. Maybe he was smoking in the bathroom or seeing if Matt's sister was home. I hoped he just had to pee. I didn't want to believe that he may have lied to me. I held him on a high pedestal — he was one of the most honest people I knew, and I didn't think I could handle him being anything less.

    I saw Matt looking at me from the corner of my eye. I turned toward him and just before I could ask him what he was looking at, my mouth and the words were stolen by Matt's lips. He kissed me. It was quick, light and feathery with a slight nip of his braces — almost like a peck, yet with more conviction — but it wasn't welcome. If I hadn't found myself in a jarring state of bewilderment, I would have pushed him away.

    Matt noticed the widening of my eyes and my failure to physically respond to the osculation, and he immediately slapped a hand over his mouth, rattling off a string of panicked apologies.

    "I'm sorry," Matt blurted, "I shouldn't have done that! I don't know why I did that... I'm so sorry!"

    I shook my head. It felt awkward and mechanical. "No," I said, "it's okay."

    "Christ," Matt said quite loudly. "It's not okay! You like Sky, but for some stupid reason I thought that kissing you would make you like me! God, I'm a damn idiot!"

    I blinked, astounded. "You know I like Sky?"

    "Yeah," Matt scoffed, passing back and forth in front of me — my eyes followed each motion he made. "It's not hard to notice the way you look at him sometimes."

    The diminutive man that resided in my mind panicked. I knew Matt wasn't malicious enough to tell Skylar of my feelings, but I still felt unnerved knowing that anyone — other than my mother — knew how I felt. I didn't want anyone to know that I knew how many scars Skylar had on the back of his right hand — thirteen — and I didn't want anyone to know that I knew Skylar bit his bottom lip exactly three times every five minutes. I wasn't ashamed; I would never be ashamed of him. But I was scared. I was scared of how deeply I felt for Skylar because I had never felt that way about anyone before, but I was more so scared of the inherent knowledge that Skylar would never feel the same.

    Blood rose to my cheeks. "It's that obvious?"

    Matt stopped, looked at me, laughed without any humor, and nodded. His behavior was borderline neurotic.

    "Are you okay with me liking him?" I asked. "Actually, are you okay with me and you just being friends?"

    He huffed, exasperated, and plopped down beside me once again. "Yeah... I mean... I'm fine with us being friends. it's not like I'm in love with you or anything. I just... I always thought you were kind of cute, and I didn't get much sleep last night, and Skylar has been getting on my last nerve ever since he walked through the door, and I guess all of that accumulated overwhelmed my better judgement," he fluidly chuckled, "but I still think you're cute."

    I smiled, nodding.

    "And I'm totally okay with you liking Sky," he shifted, "I used to look at him the same way."

    A bubble of saliva got caught in my throat, and I almost spit on him. "What?"

    "Yeah," he muttered, scratching at the back of his neck. "When Sky first moved here a couple years back, I had the hugest crush on him. He knew I did, but he never said anything about it because he didn't want to hurt my feelings, but sometimes I wish he would've told me he didn't like me 'cause it would've saved me a lot of heartache. I didn't finally get over him until last summer.

    "But I'm completely over him, now. It took the harsh reality of him not being even remotely attracted to men for me to finally let go of the hope that my feelings would be requited," he said.

    The stairs creaked and the scent of cigarettes in the air became more potent.

    Matt leaned in close to me. He spoke, his voice just above a whisper, "Don't get in too deep. I don't want you to go through the same heartache I did."

    Skylar came glided into the room with a new cigarette flaking its ashes from between his fingers. "Ready to go?" he asked. "So many people to see, so little time."

    I conjured up a smile for Matt's sake. "Yeah, I'm ready," and I had never been more ready to leave a place in my life.

☆   ☪   ☆

    After the incident with Matt that Skylar's lively presence graciously overwhelmed the thought of, we made our way back across the highway. I wanted to show the twins my tattoo, and their reactions were polar opposites; Shannyn thought it was really nice, whereas Brennyn smacked Skylar over the head and called him a bad influence. Then, Skylar stopped a random old man on the street and asked him for his opinion, which, to my surprise, the little man of wrinkled skin and liver spots — and who I assumed was staunchly old-fashioned — called it a "beautiful reminder of a significant moment" in my life. I liked that description.

    After watching Skylar chat with the old man for a near hour about the "true poetic creativity behind tattoo artistry" and how tattoos "represent a sentimentality unparalleled to the mortal human condition," Skylar checked my watch — the time nearing six o'clock — and proclaimed he had something he needed to take care of. He offered to walk me home, but I didn't want to keep him any longer than I already had, and so I let him go.

    I dragged myself home, ruing what backhanded comment my mother had waiting for me as soon as I walked in the door. She had a tendency to brood, becoming a respiratory of insults she hadn't had the time to conjure during the initial argument, so I knew she would be lurking with a newly formed comment simmering on the tip of her tongue. However, when I crept in through the backdoor, I was greeted by the purring of Jolly instead. I found Owen and Levi in the same position on the couch playing a new video game, only this time with a box of half eaten cheese pizza on the table. I asked them if the harpy — Mother — had been waiting to ambush me, but Owen said that after she ordered the pizza and put Cassie down for a nap, she shut herself in her bedroom.

    As soon as I got to my room, I went straight to my closet and pulled down the dusty old shoe box from the top shelf. I spent the following six hours laying in bed, staring at all of the old, frayed photos. I started from the bottom of the stack, the photo of Mom laying in bed at the hospital holding the newborn me as Dad kissed my forehead. I think my favorite one was in the middle of the stack; I was seven and my parents had just brought home Owen and Levi — who were only toddlers at the time — and, as Mom and Dad sat on the couch holding them, I stood beside them and stared at Owen and Levi with the most disgruntled expression a seven-year-old could muster. I wasn't jealous of my new brothers or anything; I just couldn't figure out where they came from — Mom and Dad had yet to tell me about the birds and bees. Out of the entire stack of moments, I couldn't help but to notice that there weren't that many of Cassie. Considering Dad left around the time Cassie was born, I guessed Mom didn't want to immortalize that time of our lives in photos.

    Around midnight, I found myself tired of wishing the past was still the present, and so I threw the box under my bed. I heard it tip over and the stack of moments spill across the floor, but I didn't care. At that moment, I couldn't conceive anything more than going down stairs and smashing the TV or setting fire to the kitchen. But the odd thing about it was that I wasn't even mad. I was just tired. The type of tired that plagued insomniacs and poets. And the type of tired where you knew your body was shutting down, but your mind couldn't ever fathom going to sleep because there were just so many things to think and say and do. I started thinking about how I wished I wasn't so harsh with Mom, and how I wished I had the courage to speak to Anessa, and how I wished I could just yell out all of my frustrations at Dad, and how I wished — more than anything else — that I could flush all of these wishes out of my head and just go to sleep with an empty conscience.

    My head crashed into the pillow. I forced my eyes shut, and willed every gear in my head to just stop, if for only a minute. They only stopped when I heard seven, rhythmic strikes at my window. I opened my eyes to see Skylar sitting on the tree branch, illuminated by my desk lamp. He had this goofy smile plastered across his face that spread to mine like a contagion when I let him in.

    "You all right?" he asked, running a hand through his hair.

    I nodded. "I am now."

    Skylar plopped down in the corner where I always left his pillow and blanket. "Cool. I was afraid you might need your space considering what your parents put you through."

    "You're always welcome here, Sky."

    I padded to the other side of the room. I put my pillows at the foot of the bed so I could be as close to Skylar as I could without sleeping on the floor.

    Skylar propped his chin on his arms just as I did.

    "What's on your mind?" he asked.

    I bit my lip and sighed. "You remember that time you said you didn't like your face? And then you talked about how it's sad that our faces can define who we are?"

    "Yeah," he said, nodding.

    "Well... when I told you that I learned to appreciate myself, I wasn't entirely telling the truth," I mumbled, but I knew he could hear me — he never missed a breath. "Sometimes, it's not my face that I don't like... right now, it's every part of me that I don't like."

    Skylar stared at me. The light of the desk lamp cast dancing shadows across his face and illuminated the tilted left corner of his lips. I could almost see constellations forming behind his eyelids. Then, he smiled, "We're still teenagers, Jake. We're only the first drafts of who we're supposed to be. But I assure you that someday, when you've become the final, most unimpeachable version of yourself, you'll appreciate every part of you as much as I do."

    I was speechless. But, more than that, I was in love. In that moment, thinking about how he knew exactly what to say in that magnificent mind of his, I believed that Skylar was made of the oceans and the universe and all of their shiny, beautiful contents. His mind was in a motion as constant as the path of the moon, and all of his thoughts were as fleeting as ships on the horizon, and the simple fact that Skylar existed in that way was enough to make me appreciate every breath he'd take for the rest of his days— and every single one of those breaths was infused with vast seas and galaxies. If one were to look hard enough, they'd see all of those things in his eyes, like two golden meteors held together by every drop in the ocean and every speck of matter in the atmosphere. And it was also in those moments that I wished I possessed Matt's courage: the courage of action, no matter the fear or the consequence of showing someone your heart. I wished I could speak those three words that would reveal all of me to him, but before I could even ponder the idea long enough to try, Skylar had fallen asleep. And while his mind drifted through every cloud of stardust, I was undeniably happy that I had him — at least for the moment.

☆   ☪   ☆