Nobody’s dragged Chase here. Not this time. He’s here because he wants to be. I feel my grin stretch too wide. My teeth aren’t perfectly straight and white like his. “Thanks.” I jog around the front of the car and happen to glance up. The sky has cleared, and the stars are so bright I can’t look away.
Chase sticks his head out the window. “You okay?”
I move around to the door and get in. “Sorry. It’s the stars. They’re amazing tonight.”
“I didn’t notice.” He puts the car in gear.
“You didn’t notice? How could you not notice?” A picture flashes to my mind-Jeremy and me lying on our backs, trying to count the stars. “Jer and I used to spend hours picking out constellations.”
“You can do that?”
“Yeah… Can’t you?”
He shakes his head. “We live too close to the city in Boston. I’ve seen a lot of stars here in the summers-don’t get me wrong. I just can’t pick out the shapes everybody talks about.”
Nobody should go through life without knowing how to find the Bears-the Big and Little Dippers. Or Leo the Lion? Or Draco the Dragon! I snap my seat belt. “Drive,” I command.
“Where to?”
“To the greatest show on earth.” I direct Chase to Jeremy’s and my secret stargazing spot, an Amish pasture on the edge of Grain, where lights are not allowed unless they come from the sky.
When we get there, I spread out the picnic blanket and lie down on my back. Chase sits next to me. It was so hot in the Colonial that my shirt clung to me like plastic wrap. Now a breeze rustles the grass and fans us. Bullfrogs croak from a creek I can’t see but know is there, even in August droughts. A chorus of crickets gets louder, then softer, then louder, like someone’s messing with the volume control. Somewhere far away, a horse whinnies, and another one answers. “Jeremy loves it here.”
“I can see why,” Chase says, his head tilted up to take in the sky. “The greatest show on earth.”
I inhale clover and damp grass. The sky is cloudless, and the moon barely the tip of a fingernail, so the stars pop in the sky, crystals on black velvet. “Isn’t it the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?”
Chase eases himself onto his back and gazes up. “It is.”
“Look!” I point toward a row of trees, where lightning bugs flash on and off. “They’re signaling, looking for mates.”
“Seriously?”
“It’s the boy who flashes first. If the girl likes him, she flashes back.” I glance at his face, rich in shadows. He’s grinning up at me. “What are you smiling about?” I can just imagine what I look like after a hard shift and dish duty at the Colonial.
“I don’t know. I guess… I wish I’d gotten to know you when I first started coming to Grain. You and Jeremy. And T.J. Maybe I wouldn’t have been so lonely.”
“Right. You made more friends in Grain in three minutes than I have in three years.”
“And all they talk about is each other, or themselves.”
“Don’t you and your dad talk?”
“Dad? Dad’s not much of a talker. The first summer I was here, he hardly said two words to me. I’d gotten into some trouble at home, in Boston, mostly vandalism, petty stuff. Mom thought Dad could straighten me out, I guess. But he was so used to living by himself he had no idea what to say to another person in his house, especially a kid.”
“And then you got baseball,” I say, remembering what he told T.J. and me.
“And then we got baseball.”
We’re lying on our backs and staring up at a sky full of stars that seem close enough to touch. “Jeremy told me that a long time ago people believed stars were holes into heaven, peeks behind a black curtain.”
“Peeks into heaven,” Chase muses. “I like that. Jeremy told you that?”
“Wrote it,” I explain. But I can tell Chase still doesn’t understand. “You’re wondering how the same guy who writes amazing notes and knows what people used to believe about stars can fail half of his school classes and freak out if somebody tries to take one of his empty jars from him.”
Chase shrugs, but I know I’m right about what he’s thinking. “It’s okay,” I tell him. “Jer’s impossible to figure out. ‘A contradiction in human terms.’ That’s how the Asperger’s specialist described kids like Jeremy.”
We’re silent as the stars for a couple of minutes. Then Chase asks, “Where will you go from here, Hope?” It makes me think he’s been lying here thinking about me. I’m not used to that. “Where will you go to college? What do you want to study?”
I love that Chase assumes I’m going to college. Rita assumes I’m not. But I am. I will. “Maybe photography?”
“Cool. I’d like to see some of your pictures sometime.”
“I don’t have a camera,” I admit. “I’ve bought a few of those throwaways, but I don’t usually get the pictures developed.” That’s the trick of those instant cameras. Cheap camera, expensive developing.
We talk a little about photography and college. Chase knows a lot about lighting and shutter speeds. His mother’s first husband after Sheriff Wells was a Walmart photographer who took pictures of families and portraits of kids.
“What about you?” I ask, suddenly aware that our shoulders are touching. I try to focus. “Where will you go to school? I’ll bet you could be anything you want.” I try to imagine what that would feel like.
“Princeton. Barry pulled quite a few strings to get me in. That’s where he went. I think Barry gives the school so much money they’d let his cat in if he asked.”
I have no trouble picturing Chase at an Ivy League school. “What will you study?”
“No idea.”
“You could always paint cars and repair scratches for a living. Maybe you could own your own car-repair garage and call it Chase Cars, or Car Chase, or-”
“Very funny.” Before I see what’s coming, he’s rolled over and pinned me to the ground. “Why don’t you laugh about it?” Without letting go of my wrists, he manages to tickle me.
I squirm and try to kick free, but he’s too strong. I can’t budge. Laughing, I shout, “I give! I take it back!”
For a second, Chase stops, but he doesn’t get off. Our bodies are millimeters apart, his thighs trapping mine. His face, brushed with moon shadows, is suspended above mine.
Then he eases off me and stares up at the stars. I hear his breathing, heavy and strained, and my own heart beating to his rhythm.
After a minute I point to the sky. “You can see Draco the Dragon right there. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the whole constellation so clearly-all four stars of its head and that long tail.”
“Where?” Chase tilts his head closer to mine. “I can never see these things.”
Hoping against hope that my hand isn’t shaking and my deodorant still works, I lift my arm and point. “See the Big Dipper there? Start at the tip and follow it over to-”
He clasps my wrist and holds it for a second, then slides his fingers down the length of my arm. Currents race through every inch of skin and bone. In one movement, he rolls onto his side. I feel his leg next to mine, pressing. His other hand reaches across so that he’s above me, his head touching mine. Our breath is one. His chest rises with mine. Slowly, so that I can see every move, he lowers his face…
And he kisses me.
I don’t close my eyes. I always thought I would, if anybody ever kissed me. But I don’t. Why would I want to miss even a second of this? With my eyes open, I can see Chase’s skin, a shock of his hair that falls over my forehead. I can see stars above us, shining outside like I’m shining inside.
When he stops, when we stop, I whisper, “I’m not sure what to say now.” I can’t get over the tiny shivers in my arms and the way my heart shudders. “What do people say after they kiss?”
“Haven’t you kissed anyone before, Hope?” Chase winds a strand of my straight, straight hair and turns it into a blond curl around his index finger.
“Not like that.”
He grins. “You could have fooled me.”
“I wouldn’t want to.”
“You wouldn’t, would you?” He touches his forehead to mine for an instant, then pulls back. “You know, every other girl I’ve been with pretends to be more experienced than she really is. Don’t ask me why.”