2. Homesick – Stella
There’s a tiny clink on my window, and with it, I hop out of bed and slip on my shoes before opening it. It’s dark, the moon nearly full, and its glow is lighting up Riggs’ face more than normal. His hand moves in the dim light, a come-on gesture I’ve seen a million times by now. Nodding, I grab the messenger bag I keep on the cushioned bench of what my mother calls a reading nook (it has instead become my writing nook, much to her dismay) before pushing the window open further and swinging my legs out.
With well-practiced moves, the toes of my battered white Converse touch the tree”s rough bark next to my window before I step onto it. Then, I proceed to carefully climb down until my feet hit the ground.
We walk quickly in silence until we’re two blocks down the road, where he parked his truck. Despite the late August weather, I’m shivering in the night air as we hop in. Before I even say a word, he leans in the back, grabbing an old sweatshirt and tossing it at me.
Smiling, I tug it over my head, trying to be discreet as I sniff the collar that smells like Riggs.
“I wasn’t sure if you’d be up,” he says as he starts the truck and puts it into drive. “You didn’t text me back.”
“Mom took my phone again,” I say with a sigh. He looks over at me as he drives, his smile wide, and his dimple comes out. My heart pulses hard, looking at my best friend, the most handsome boy I’ve ever seen.
Riggins Greene was my neighbor for the first fourteen years of my life until my mother decided she didn’t like my spending so much time with him and forced us to move to the other side of town. She would have moved out of Ashford altogether to punish me more, but that would also mean punishing my twin, Everest. Considering Evie is the perfect daughter, she’d do anything to keep her happy.
So now I live eight traffic lights away, a full three miles from him. Thankfully, there was only a year between my moving and Riggs getting his license, so there was only a year of riding bikes a mile and a half to meet each other halfway. Now, when we want to write songs, he picks me up, and we drive to our spot.
“What’d you do this time?”
I shrug but smile all the same.“I told her I don’t want to do cheer this year. Sign-up forms came home.”
“Oh, how dare you.”
“I’m ruining my future career opportunities, you know,” I tell him, quoting my mother. “Not having four years of cheer on my college applications is the end of the world.”
He scoffs out a laugh, then reaches over and scrubs his hand over my hair, mussing it.
“As if you’re smart enough to go to college,” he says with a smile.
I slap my hand on his chest. “Hey, I’m plenty smart. That’s why you had to have me, a sophomore, help you with your junior-year math homework last year.”
“I know, little star. You’re plenty smart.”
I roll my eyes, but now that we’re on the topic….
“What are you doing next year?” I ask, suddenly interested in my nails as he drives over familiar dirt roads.
“What?”
“Are you going to, uh, apply to colleges and whatnot this fall?”
He scoffs out a laugh.
“Hell no. We’re taking the band on the road as soon as I finish school. Gonna try and get a label to sign us.”
I know this, of course. It’s what he’s always talked about. But now that the future is looking much less distant, Riggins leaving Ashford with his band seems less like a daydream and more like a clear road he’ll travel soon.
A road that will lead him far, far away from me.
“Mmm,” I say noncommittally because I don’t know how else to answer without sounding stupid or clingy. He has to leave me behind—my mom would never allow me to drop out of school and go with him—and he has to get out of here, out of this town where everyone looks at him with pity, where everyone knows about his mom and his dad and expects Riggs to end up just like him.
A washed-up daydreamer in a dead-end town.
But I don’t have to come up with a better answer when the truck bumps a few more times before he puts it into park.
“Come on,” he says. “Let’s go write.”
The only thing I love more than writing songs with Riggins late at night is lying under the stars with him. It’s something we did long before we started writing before his mom died, and before his dad started drinking, back when our parents were still friends and would spend summer nights together, grilling and having a few drinks in one of our backyards.
Evie, Riggs, and I would wander just far enough so our parents couldn’t hear us talking, lay in the grass, and watch the stars move.
It’s because you got the cool name, Everest would say. That’s why you love the stars. All I got was a big mountain people die on. I never argued because of the two of us, I always thought my name was the coolest. Riggs also never argued that fact, and after a lifetime of everyone comparing me to Evie and me coming up short, I kind of liked his quiet agreement.
We’d lay there all night, chatting about silly things like TV shows and movies and whatever was happening at school while our parents hung out. Even though he’s just barely two years older, he never made me feel like it was a chore to hang out with us, even though I’m sure he was told to watch us rather than play with us.
“You’re my best friend, you know,” Riggs says under his breath as we lay on the big blanket we keep in his truck, staring at those same stars we watched back then. The same stars I hope we’ll still watch together ten, twenty years from now.
“I know, Riggs. You’re mine, too.” Another beat of silence passes.
“You’ll go with me, right?” I don’t reply, not sure what he means. Or, to be clear, I didn’t know if what I hoped he meant was what he actually meant. “On tour, once you’re out of school,” he clarifies.
My pulse races, but I don’t answer.
“I need you with me. I can’t do it without you, Stell.”
“You can do anything you want, Riggs. You don’t need anyone. You’re… you’re you.”
“Fine,” he says, correcting, reaching down to where my hand lays on the blanket, grabbing it and twining our fingers together. “I don’t want to do it without you.” A long beat passes as I concentrate on nothing but Riggins’ hand in mine and pray my palms don’t feel sweaty. “I don’t want to do anything without you, little star,” he says, using the name he started using back when we were little kids in the grass.
There’s no question in my mind when I answer.
“Yeah, Riggs. I’ll go with you,” I whisper, and the words feel huge when I speak them out loud.
He doesn’t respond, instead lifting our joined hands and pressing the back of mine to his lips.
Even though it probably doesn’t count, I catalog it as the first time Riggins kissed me.