She Dims the Stars (27 page)

I sit up and curl my legs beneath me, never looking away from him as I do. “My therapist asked me what it was like. My depression. The anxiety. She asked for an accurate description of the feelings inside of me when it’s happening. There are so many ways to put it, but the best way I could describe it to her is that it’s like being underwater. I’m constantly drowning, no matter how hard I kick, how hard I fight to get to the surface, I am always under the water, trying to breathe. I can see people standing at the edge with their hands reaching out for me to help me up, but I can’t get to them. I’m like a raccoon with a shiny thing in my grasp. It’s closed, and I can’t get it to open no matter how hard I try to open my palm,
I can’t
. Both fists are closed so tight that I can’t get to the surface and take a hand for the help I need. I know that if I did, I would break the surface and breathe. I know there is air there.”

He’s watching my hands while I show him how tight my fists can squeeze. My knuckles are white, and the tendons are straining as I take a deep breath and exhale, unfurling them and leaning forward to touch his fingertips with my own.

“You’re that for me, Elliot. You help me breathe, and it scares the shit out of me. You uncurl my fists. You stop the tapping by holding my hand. You squeeze my fingers when they’re busy,
and you see me
… You see me do these things when other people would ignore it or think I was just weird. You have this way about you where you notice little things, and it makes you amazing, but it also scares me. If you see too much …”

“There’s nothing else that I could possibly see that would make me run away.” His hand is holding mine now and his grip is strong, a wordless promise.

“So, I guess I’m saying that I love you, too.”

His smile gets so big it looks like he might be giving himself an internal high five or something.

“You should know I don’t want kids,” I blurt out, suddenly.

He leans back and makes a face. “Kinda just wanted to start with calling you my girlfriend first, if that’s okay.”

“Yeah.” I laugh, and with it comes a couple of tears in my eyes that I reach up and wipe away quickly. “Okay. If you need labels and stuff, we can do that.”

“I definitely need to have a label on this.” He slides closer until we are face to face and our noses brush. “Otherwise, I have to keep using terrible pick-up lines like, ‘Hey, girl. I just dropped a new single. It’s me. I’m single.’” His eyebrows raise, and his mouth turns down as if to ask if I’m impressed.

“I
definitely
need you to call me your girlfriend, then. For the sake of all humanity.” I don’t wait for him to make the move. I do it on my own. Taking his face in my hands, I pull him in for a kiss, soft and lingering, running my fingers through his wayward hair. His glasses hit my face when I turn my head, and we both let out a laugh when he pulls back and takes them off.

“Did you like the game?” He asks, his hands roaming my legs and higher, making me squirm.

“Of course, I did. Your title needs some work, though.”

Elliot leans back, fake-offended. “What?”

I shrug. “The acronym is SDtS which looks so much like STDs it’s not even funny. You’ll have a ton of people saying shit about it once it’s released. Maybe just shorten it to
Dims the Stars
? I’m not a marketing professional.”

“You want me to release it?” He asks, moving in again, crawling over my body on the couch, pinning me on both sides as he straddles my stomach and slips his fingers into mine.

“I’d be offended if you didn’t. It’s gonna make us millionaires.”

“Billionaires!” Comes Cline’s voice from behind his bedroom door. “Also, can you move this to the bedroom? I’m trying to get my beauty sleep.”

“That much sleep is called a coma!” I yell to him and watch as his door slowly opens and his head appears.

Elliot is completely still on top of me, and Cline walks toward us with tentative steps, his eyes wide and hands up in front of him. “Let’s all remember that the coma joke was said by Audrey. I was not the one who instigated it. I had no hand in it …”

With a nudge, I shove Elliot off of me, and I’m sitting up next to him on the couch, looking them both over. “Is this how it’s going to be? Eggshells? Because if it is, you need to stop that shit right now. I’m not a fragile fucking flower. I ride an alicorn.” I nod my head for emphasis. “I slay fedora wearing dragons.”

“No, you don’t. He’s your friend,” Cline says, pointing a finger at me.

“I’m the hero in this game, boys. Don’t you forget it.” I stand and walk over to Cline, standing on my tiptoes to reach up and give him a hug. “I love you, you idiot,” I whisper when he hugs me back.

“I have a girlfriend,” he says back right before I poke him in the neck and make him fold in two, giggling like a doughboy.

Pushing him back, I extend my hand to Elliot, and he takes it, following behind me to his bedroom. “So does Elliot,” I say as I close the door.

We’re alone in his room, his piles of clothes still scattered about and wires still coming from every possible place imaginable. He sits on the bed and watches me while I settle into the desk chair and swivel side to side.

“Are you tired?” I ask.

He shakes his head no, and I turn some more, tilting my head to look up at the ceiling.

“Me either. What a conundrum.”

“I can think of a few things we could do,” he says, and I roll my head forward to look at him with an eyebrow raised.

“Does one of them include using your superpower?”

He makes a “come hither” motion with two fingers, and I nod.

“Yep. That’s the one.”

“Since we’re on the subject…” His gaze lowers to the bedspread and he licks his lips before he speaks again, quieter this time. “That night. Was that your first time?”

“Would you be super shocked if I said that it was? I told you before that I’m not comfortable with my body.”

“Why didn’t you say anything?” The look on his face is almost adorable, but my cheeks are on fire and my hands are sweating so it’s a little hard to appreciate.

I shrug. “You’re awkward and I have panic attacks. Did you really think that would go over well?”

He nods a couple times and blinks rapidly. “Fair enough.”

“The truth is that you’re the first person I felt safe with. And if you’re wondering whether or not it had anything to with what happened afterward…”

“I saw the texts. I know it wasn’t that.”

“So sure of yourself,” I joke, swiveling in the chair once more.

“I mean if you’re not sure whether it was good or not, we could always try it again. You know. For science.” He’s grinning and that pull in my chest becomes so tight I can hardly breathe, but it’s in the very best way.

“I could never deny science.” I stand, cross to the bed, and crawl onto the mattress with him, lying on my side so that he mirrors my position. Our hands find each other and fingers link between us as we stare at one another in his one-lamp-lit bedroom. He’s looking at me with such adoration, but there’s another layer behind it—worry—that he’s trying to bury for this moment between us. “I’m okay. I can’t promise you that every single day is going to be perfect, but I what I
can
promise is that I’m trying my very hardest. It’ll be amazing and sometimes it’ll be terrible, but I’m in here fighting to stay afloat. For the first time in years, I have people I trust to talk to about it. Besides a doctor, I mean. You see me, and because of that, I don’t want to disappear anymore.”

He touches his nose to mine and brushes his lips softly over my chin. “And if you ever get to that place again?”

I lean back and hold up our hands between us, my palm open to his, fist unfurled. “I have a hand to reach for.”

I can’t find Audrey in this swarm of people, and it’s beginning to make me nervous.

“Elliot! Elliooootttttt!” Cline is waving frantically at me from one of the vendor booths, his beer sloshing over the side of the cup he’s holding in his hand. I follow where he’s pointing and can’t help but laugh at what he’s freaking out about. A group of girls are waiting for the next act to take the stage, and they’re all wearing a
Dims
t-shirt. They’ve cut them up so that they’re basically shredded tank tops, but if they want to trash a thirty dollar t-shirt, that’s not my business.

Seeing a group of girls wearing our shirts with rainbow poop cookies on them at a four-day music festival in Memphis is a little surreal, though. Even after all these months.

A pink head of hair stops in front of me, and Audrey’s eyes appear beneath the neatly trimmed bangs. She’s holding VIP passes in one hand and cold water bottles in the other. “Did you see them? The girls in the shirts?”

“Of course, I did. Cline was freaking out and not being the least bit cool about it,” I tell her as I take a VIP pass and a water from her.

September and Thursday arrive just seconds later, both wearing wigs as well, one bright blue and the other electric green. It was an act of solidarity when Audrey realized she wasn’t going to be able to go to the festival without being recognized as the face of the wildly popular game/app
Dims the Stars
.

When a college kid makes that kind of money, in that small of an amount of time, press gets wind of it, and then there are news outlets involved and magazines get called. I wasn’t going to lie and say that I’d created it on my own. Audrey and Cline were stakeholders as far as I was concerned.

I paid off mom’s mortgage. Put some money away for a rainy day. I still took the internship at Ten2One, but essentially they offered me a regular position, and I couldn’t handle the load with school work, so they’re holding it for me until after I graduate. If I still want it.

Who knows, though? I might just be able to start my own company after this.

It took an adjustment period for Audrey to accept that people related to her through the game. When she did an interview and shared her battle with depression and anxiety, the outpouring of support and people sharing their stories with her was overwhelming to the point that she actually had to go offline for about a week.

“I can’t be someone’s role model,” she said. Pale and shaking, she pushed the laptop away and shook her head over and over. “I didn’t sign up for this.”

“And if you save one life? Just one because you were honest enough to tell other people that they’re not alone, and someone out there understands even just a glimpse of what they’re going through … wouldn’t that be worth it?” That was September, who we had to call, because it was one of those low moments that Audrey had said would happen but we were still unprepared for.

I think it took two days for her to let it sink in that what she’d been through could end up helping someone else. We had a discussion. I set up a website, and she wrote a blog. Then she added an anonymous question button for anyone who wanted to ask her anything. Some stuff was easy, and she answered it with grace. Others were harder, and it took some hand holding to get her through it.

The entire experience helped her find herself and her purpose, though. She works closely with certain organizations, like Project Semicolon, to spread hope where people may not feel there’s any to be had. She even has a little semicolon tattoo between her thumb and forefinger. She says it’s a reminder, a promise. Every time we hold hands and our skin touches in that exact place, Audrey knows that she has more life to live. She has more of her story to tell.

“Thursday, where is Micah?” Audrey asks, and the girl in the green wig points toward where Cline is standing, next to the tall redheaded guy we’ve recently come to know as her boyfriend. “Oh, no. He has that look on his face, Sep. He’s going to do something stupid. You’d better intervene.”

The sisters take her warning and run off to stop whatever ridiculousness
our
best friend is about to pull, and I take Audrey into my arms, pulling her close as the crowds start to shift forward for the next band.

One year is all it took to change my life completely.

One moment to shift it on a different course.

One second of a stranger’s kiss—a rock on a window—a call from out of the blue.