Falling Like Stars

Prologue

NO ONE BELIEVES their life can change so fast. That it can shatter into a million pieces in a single instant…until it does. One minute your life is one way, in the Before. And then suddenly it’s After, and you don’t know how you got there. Whiplash of the soul, I guess you could call it.

My dad dying felt like that. Like an explosion that sent Mom and me flying. One minute he was here, and the next he was gone. My mother is technically still alive, but she didn’t survive the crash. Not really. She’s still Here, but mostly There. Undead. As for me, I was blasted above the wreckage and now float like an astronaut that’s been untethered from the mothership. I might just drift forever.

Before and After. Here and There.

Someday, I hope to land on solid ground. When I do, I know Josh will be there to catch me.

“You’re cold,” Josh says.

“I’m fine. Now, look.” I point at my sketch. “You’ll have a red waistcoat, see? And boots—”

“Why do we look like zombies?”

“ Undead .”

“What’s the difference?”

“‘Zombie’ sounds cheesy. Undead is more elegant.”

Josh laughs. “If you say so.”

Halloween is a week away. Josh and I are going as the March Hare and Alice, from Alice in Wonderland , but with a twist.

“Everyone has seen Alice in Wonderland a hundred times,” I say. “I want us to stand out.”

A shiver escapes me. Josh gives me a knowing look, which I ignore. My cousins from Michigan think Los Angeles never gets cold, but the nights in late fall and winter are chilly, like tonight. And loud. We live in Tarzana, and it’s like that Tom Petty song; there’s a freeway running through the yard. Not exactly, but pretty close. The 101 is right there , with its endless stream of cars.

But we hardly notice anymore . I don’t notice much anyway when Josh is with me. Not the noise or being cold. I’m full of him. His body is close to mine as we sit together on my front porch swing.

Josh kisses my temple. “You’re a genius at this stuff. And you’re shivering.”

“I’m fine.”

“I’ll get you my hoodie.”

He starts to go, but I pull him back, tugging the sleeve of his plaid flannel. “There are other ways to keep me warm, you know.”

“Like what?” he asks, his blue eyes twinkling. He’s teasing because he knows I have a hard time saying the mushy stuff.

I keep my eyes on my sketch. “Actions can be taken.”

“Do you want me to put my arm around you, Rowan Walsh?”

Yes, always.

I shrug one shoulder, and he tilts my chin up so that I look up at him. He’s smiling, of course. He has the best smile. He wears it in his eyes, and his eyes are always on me. He slips his arm around my slight shoulders and kisses me softly. His kisses are the best too, though I don’t have anything to compare them to. I’ve only kissed Josh Bennett and will only ever kiss Josh Bennett. I may just be fifteen, but some things you just know.

The kiss deepens and gets breathless, but he pulls away.

“Don’t want your mom to see,” he says with a glance at the window behind us. It’s dark. My house is always dark. The only lights are the ones I turn on.

“Mom’s asleep,” I say even though it’s barely seven-thirty. Josh’s arm tightens around me because he knows the deal. Since Dad died two years ago, Mom’s checked out. Here but not here.

A zombie. Nothing elegant about it.

“At least she’s not laying out your clothes for school tomorrow like my mom is,” Josh says.

“She is not,” I say, laughing.

Josh smiles fondly at the house across the street that is warm and bright and has all its lights on. “She’s probably putting toothpaste on my toothbrush too.”

I nudge his side, grateful for him and how he tries to make me feel better about our situations. He tries to turn his mom’s care for him into a kind of smothering, so I won’t feel so bad that I have to do everything on my own. Smothering is one letter away from mothering . I wouldn’t mind a little bit of either now and then.

“We’re running short on time, so we’ll have to go to Goodwill and try to find something like this for you,” I say, shading the March Hare’s trousers. “But I’ll sew the waistcoat.”

“You’re going to make that?” Josh shakes his head, marveling. “Not that I’m surprised. You’re so damn good.”

He kisses my temple, and I smile down at my sketch, my face warm with a teeny bit of pride. It’s an intricate design that’s going to take me weeks to finish, but I’m up for the challenge. This is my passion—to create beautiful things out of heaps of cloth and have them tell a story. Josh is always telling me I have a gift, but it’s just something I love.

Like him. I love him. I should say thank you for the compliment or kiss him back, but he makes my muscles turn floppy and my brain short-circuit. He’s the only one who does that to me. The entire rest of the world has to keep out —it took my dad without so much as a warning and turned my mom into a sleepwalker. Life is not to be trusted. But Josh…

I trust him with my life.

We’ve been across-the-street neighbors forever. His parents and my parents used to have barbecues and dinner parties. We played together as toddlers. We splashed around in plastic pools at his house and jumped on the trampoline at mine. We were eleven when he pecked me on the lips and told me he loved me. I’d stared in shock because just the night before I’d written the same thing in my diary.

I love Josh and not like a brother. More than that. I love Josh with all my heart.

I didn’t say it back. It was one thing to write it down and another to tell him to his face, but Josh didn’t seem to mind. He smiled—always smiling!—and said, “It’s okay. I know you, Rowan. I’ll wait until you’re ready.”

We kissed for real when we were thirteen and he told me he loved me again. I held him tight and nearly said it into the warm skin of his neck, but by then my dad was dead and I was scared. I cried instead.

Josh stroked my hair. “We have time. You and me, we’re forever.”

I could only hold him tighter, loving him so much and feeling so grateful to have something solid to cling to. My world had been devastated by the earthquake of my dad’s heart attack, and the aftershocks just kept coming.

Tonight, on the swing, Josh tugs a lock of my blonde hair. “I thought you said this was a couple’s costume. I didn’t know Alice and the March Hare were a thing.”

“They’re not. Not exactly. But…”

“But Alice is secretly into bestiality? She wants to jump the Hare’s bones?” He pretends to consider this. “I don’t remember learning that in English class.”

I snort a laugh, my face growing hot despite the cold October wind. That’s another thing Josh is willing to wait for—me to jump his bones. Some days I’m almost desperate for it, but I want to wait until I’m at least sixteen. Sex feels like a lot of emotional and physical responsibility, and I don’t have my mom to talk it over with or help me get on birth control.

But on the swing with Josh’s arm around me and my love for him filling every part of me, it’s hard not to want everything with him right now. I’m ready to get this childhood part of my life over with. With Mom out of commission, I already have to be the adult in the house, so it seems silly to keep pretending. I’ll go to UCLA or the Fashion Institute, and then work in Hollywood, making costumes for the movies. Josh will become an engineer because his brilliant mind is full of things he wants to build. We’ll get married and have kids, a nice house on a quiet street. It’s all there, just not yet. Like a mirage in the desert, it’s still a long way away.

“I don’t want to go as a boring, cliched couple,” I say.

“You don’t want to go as something mushy and romantic, you mean,” Josh teases.

“Everyone at school is going to be Bella and Edward,” I say. “There’s no challenge in Oxfords and sweatshirts.”

“Speaking of sweatshirts, you’re not wearing one, and you’re still shivering. I’m going. Don’t say no.”

He stands up and I don’t say no because I am cold, but also because he’ll get his UCLA Bruins hoodie and I’ll get to sleep in it, wrapped in its softness and full of his scent.

Josh bends his tall frame over the swing, a hand on either side of me, and kisses me, soft and sweet. “Be right back.”

I smile and watch him go. He waits until a car passes then jogs to his house. Inside, his parents will be watching TV together. Carol will remind Josh it’s a school night and not to stay out too late. Graham will tell her gently that he’s growing up and can take care of himself. And they’ll exchange smiles because she knows he’s right, and he knows that she can’t help it. She loves him too much.

I can relate, I think and go back to my sketch.

The freeway drones behind me, our street is in front. A car screeches around the corner four blocks down and heads this way as the front door opens across the street. Josh—blue hoodie in hand—comes out and shuts the door behind him. He sees me watching him and gives a wave and a smile, then jogs toward me. A math problem from class animates itself in my mind: two lines converging on the same point, about to reach it at the exact same time.

I stand up on Jell-O legs, my voice trapped in a throat that’s gone dry. The car is coming fast—too fast—but engine noises are the backdrop to our lives. Josh always looks, but this time he doesn’t…because he’s looking at me.

Three things happen at the same time, and all of those things happen too late. I scream, Josh sees the car, and the car’s driver finally sees him. The sedan shouldn’t be in the middle of the street where Josh is, but it is.

There’s a squealing of tires and then Josh is no longer in the middle of the street. He’s vanished into thin air. There’s only the car with a smashed-in windshield and one of Josh’s shoes lying in the glare of its headlights.

He’s been knocked out of his shoes.

Shock descends over me like a clear glass dome. There’s no air and I can’t hear anything, not even Carol Bennet who comes racing out of her house, mouth open because she’s screaming. We both run to Josh, nearly half a block away.

I get to him first.

I nearly slip in the blood streaking the pavement.

I hold his broken head in my lap and put my mouth to his ear.

“I love you, I love you, I love you,” I whisper again and again. I whisper it until the sirens come and they try to pull him away from me. “I love you, I love you, I love you.”

I’ve never said it before and now it’s too late, and I know—even now—that I’ll never say it again.