Catch a Falling Star (2 page)

Yeah, this is how I look when I wake up. The last time I’d seen one

of his movies, he’d been playing some sort of teenage James-Bond-

goes-to-high-school. The plot escaped me. Still, seeing him there

in the window, I felt a strange ribbon of nerves move through my

stomach.

He reached out the window, dumped a cup of ice, and then the

window slid closed again, its tint reflecting our astonishment

before the Range Rover moved away up the street.

Chloe shrieked, “Get me a cup!”

I shook my head. “Oh, you are not going to —” But before I

could finish, a woman with a blond bob tossed the remains of her

iced tea into a shrub and thrust her glass into Chloe’s outstretched

hand. As if she’d unearthed a treasure of gold, Chloe hurried to

scoop up the fallen ice.

The door of our café banged open, and my dad emerged with

two plates of mango chicken salad for the women sitting near the

small fountain in front, the dinner plates like saucers in his large

3

hands. He checked to make sure they didn’t need anything else

before noticing that one of his employees was in the gutter scoop-

ing up dirty ice cubes.

He frowned and glanced at me. “Do I want to know?”

I grinned. “Nope.”

He disappeared back inside.

Chloe held up the glass, triumphant, the melted bits of ice

glimmering in the afternoon light. She blew a strand of dark hair

from her face. “Take a picture.”

Shaking my head, I clicked a picture with my phone and sent it

to her. “You’re ridiculous. Now get back to work before I have you

fired.” I nodded toward her empty busing tray. “You can start with

the glass you’re holding.”

Her look suggested I’d asked her to move to Yemen. “I’m not

throwing this out.” She placed it gently on a nearby table. “I’m

keeping it.”

“It’ll melt, brainiac.”

Chloe plopped her nearly empty busing tray back on the rack.

“I love you, Carter, but I worry about you. This ice belonged to

Adam Jakes.
Adam Jakes
. That’s going in my freezer. I don’t care if

your dad makes me pay for this glass, too.”

I laughed, picking up the pieces of the broken cup Chloe had

abandoned earlier, knowing Dad wouldn’t make her pay for either

of them. “You’re a highly disturbed individual.”

She squinted after the departed car, wiping absently at a coffee

spill on one of the empty two-top marbled tables near the fence.

“Did you see the guy in front? That was Parker Hill, Adam Jakes’s

manager. He’s thirty-two, British, and a Pisces.”

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I tossed the broken cup into the garbage. “Why do you know

that?” I pulled my long brown hair away from my neck. We’d only

been outside a few minutes, but already the heat was getting to me.

Chloe handed me a hair tie. “I know things. And how can you

not think that was exciting? Adam Jakes just drove right by us.

Adam Jakes just dumped his ice on
our street
.” She pointed at the

small pool of wet his ice had left, now quickly drying in the sun.

I frowned. “Kind of rude, if you ask me. When Crazy Jay

dumps his ice on our sidewalk, you think he’s disgusting.”

She frowned at me. “You’re hopeless.”

“I know.” I grinned, clearing a stack of dishes. “But that’s why

you love me.”

Shaking her head, she leaned against the fence, the tables

behind her forgotten.

The café door banged open again, and Dad emerged with two

more salads for a different table. Pausing, he caught Chloe idling

against the fence. “Funny thing, Chlo — those dishes still haven’t

learned how to wash themselves.”

She pushed away from the fence. “I’m on it, Mr. Moon.”

“I’ll be inside, not holding my breath.” Dad disappeared back

through the front door, wiping his hands on the burgundy half-

apron I almost never saw him without.

I filled the rest of my busing tray with the remaining dishes

(sans Chloe’s celebrity ice) and checked to make sure one of our

regulars, Mr. Michaels, was okay on coffee. He smiled at me from

his roost at the farthest table tucked back against the side of the

café, his wrinkled face even more dappled with the afternoon light

coming through the leaves of the old maple that made umbrellas

5

unnecessary for most of our patio seats. He raised his coffee cup,

so I scooted over with a pot of decaf.

He gave my arm a nice squeeze and nodded toward Chloe.

“What’s all the excitement about?” His voice had that whispery

sort of fatigue people got in their seventies, like they’d just gone

and talked themselves out over the years and didn’t have much left.

“That car that just passed there,” I told him, putting my hand

on his flannel-shirted shoulder; it was pushing ninety degrees out-

side, but Mr. Michaels was always in flannel. “It had a movie star in

it. Adam Jakes. The one who’s filming here for the next few weeks.”

Mr. Michaels swirled the remaining coffee in his cup. “I read

something about that in the paper. He’s filming a Christmas movie?”

I nodded. “Right. For the next few weeks, Hollywood will be

filming a Christmas movie. Even though it’s June. And Chloe’s

freaking out because she got to touch Adam Jakes’s ice.” I widened

my eyes, clasping the hand that wasn’t holding the coffee over my

heart. “His
ice
, Mr. Michaels!”

Chloe scrunched up her nose, a busing tray full of dishes against

her slim hip, her face a mask of disappointment at our sad lack of

pop culture appreciation. “You both should be freaking out. This is

a big deal.” She held up the sacred glass, the ice mostly melted now.

“That,” I told her, not bothering to hide my amusement, “is a

glass of water.”

Chloe stomped inside in a huff.

“He’s filming tomorrow downtown. We have to go.” Chloe

squinted at her laptop, tucking her short hair behind her ears.

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“I’m working tomorrow.” I sipped some iced peppermint tea

and waited for her to finish checking her various celebrity sites.

We were late to meet her boyfriend, Alien Drake, for stargazing,

but it was no use pushing her until she was done.

Chewing my straw, I stared at the pictures plastered on the

massive bulletin board above her desk, a layered collection that

spil ed off in all directions. Pinned amid magazine cutouts of swoon-

worthy actors, at least a dozen of the pictures featured seventeen-

year-old Adam Jakes, his six-foot frame always muscular and tan,

his hair with just the right amount of tousle, his eyes oceanic.

There were a few of him smiling, his face lit up, and one of him

obviously laughing. But in the more recent photos, he looked

gloomy and distant, his face showing the wear of his recent scandal.

Even
I
knew how much trouble he’d been in. You’d have to live

in a hole not to have noticed his face splashed all over
Star
and

Celebrity!
last November, documenting his reckless involvement

with an unknown twenty-two-year-old redhead, a fast car (also

red), and an amount of cocaine the tabloids kept referring to as

“substantial.” In one of the larger black-and-white photos Chloe

had pinned up, I thought he just looked sad.

She had some other pictures up there, too — pictures of Alien

Drake, some of me, and some of the three of us together, usual y at

one of our star-watching nights. These were my favorites, but it felt

strange to see them sandwiched in between all the celebrities, like we

could ever be part of the same galaxy. I squinted at a new one I hadn’t

seen before of me in profile tugging at the end of my ponytail, staring

off over the roofline of Alien Drake’s house, the sky darkening.

“When’d you take that?” I asked her, pointing to it.

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“Hmmmm.”

She wasn’t listening to me, still focused on the screen in front of

her. I scanned the rest of the wall, smiling at the glossy Adam Jakes’s

glass-of-ice print newly taped over an old picture of Adam Jakes at

a Lakers game. Chloe never took anything down. She just kept

pasting things over other things, papering her walls like some sort

of room-sized decoupage project. Every so often, a pale purple

wall peeked through, but only rarely. Many a roll of Scotch tape

had been sacrificed in the name of Chloe’s wall collages.

One of the things I loved about Chloe was she’d always been a fan

girl, pure of heart and obsessed. Even though we’d only started hang-

ing out in ninth grade, her room still held fragments of the girl who’d

loved any book, movie, or game featuring fairies or superheroes. Every

concert ticket, every play, every actor crush of her past still existed

somewhere in the layers of those walls. If you started unpeeling,

you’d unearth Chloe’s seventeen years of life. Even if I didn’t share

her Hol ywood obsession, I admired her for loving it so completely.

My phone buzzed.

Where the asterisk! are you guys?

I texted Alien Drake back:

C’s drooling over Adam Jakes — in case you’ve been

living under a rock, he’s in town!!!?

Seconds later:

Gee, hadn’t heard. Tell her to bring a towel & get over here.

“Alien Drake’s waiting.” I picked up the quilt I knew she liked

from her bed. Alien Drake was Drake Masuda, my neighbor and

best friend of twelve years and Chloe’s boyfriend for the last six

months. My phone buzzed again.

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A cattle prod works nicely.

I laughed out loud. “Your boyfriend suggested I use a cattle

prod if you don’t get a move on. You ready? I’d prefer not to resort

to violence.”

“Almost.” Chloe frowned at something on the screen, mak-

ing no move to hurry. As usual. “He has an early call. I wonder

what that means?”

Annoyance bubbled up in me. I was trying to be patient but,

seriously, we were going to miss my favorite part of the night, when

the sky purpled and the stars suddenly jumped out from the velvet

dark. I sighed in a sort of overdramatic way I hoped she’d notice.

She didn’t.

As much as Chloe was obsessed with this stuff, I was the exact

opposite. Why should I care about actors? They just happened to be

good at acting, the way some people were good at fixing cars or building

bridges. Just because they were splashed all over magazines, television,

the Internet, did that mean I should listen to their opinions about the

world energy crisis or hear what they ate for dinner? It was so weird.

“I think early call means he has to show up to work early,” I told

her, hoping to move her along. No wonder Alien Drake had to

threaten farm equipment. This girl had her own time zone. “As do

I. As do you. So let’s go. This is getting ridiculous.” Nothing. “Chloe!”

“Fine.” She slammed her laptop shut, flashing me her own

trademark Hollywood smile, the one that usually came right before

she needed something from me. The one I could never refuse. “But

you’re coming with me tomorrow to see him, right?” There it was.

“Of course I am.” Anything to get her out of this room and up

on that roof.

9

yesterday’s sightings

Things Are Looking Up in Little, CA

Morning, sky watchers. Last night, we sat on the roof and

thought about nebulas.

No, that’s not dirty (get your mind out of the gutter and

into the sky).

A nebula is where a star is born. It’s all the junk that has to

come together — dust, helium, hydrogen, ionized gases —

to create the right conditions for a star. Think about it: There

are so many stars in the sky, we can’t even count them — it’d

be like counting every grain of sand on the beach. Stil , they

aren’t just up there. It takes something, the exact right sort

of condition, to make a star. It got us thinking about how

everything in life needs a nebula. If we don’t have the right

sort of conditions, what chance do we have?

See you tonight, under the sky.

10

two

the next morning, Hollywood descended on Little. We lived two

blocks from the café, but I could already hear the purr of genera-

tors the moment I stepped out onto the front porch of our house. I

studied the line of pines behind the Victorians across the street,

green but dry against a pale morning sky. The air already warm, I

took the steps two at a time, giving our black Lab, Extra Pickles, a

quick pat where he lay sprawled on our front walk.

My mom was packing our white VW van on the street in front

of our house.

“Need help?” I watched her heave a container full of what

looked like pretzels into the back. “Are those pretzels?”

“Snacks for the volunteers.” She wiped at a glisten of sweat on

her forehead and tightened her ponytail, a mirror version of mine.

Tall and athletic, her dark hair streaked from days in the sun, Mom

could pass for thirty even if that was how old she was when she had

me. She never wore makeup and mined all her clothes from the

local consignment shops. To me, she always looked pretty, even