Work Text:
It was fun for a while, spending the winter squatting in that family’s summer house with the tattoo artists she’d met on the boardwalk. Then they’d started talking about forming a band and Star knew it was time to move on.
“But you love music,” Michael said, slinging a trash bag of her clothes over his shoulder as they hauled another load out to his mom’s station wagon.
“I’ll still play,” Star said, shrugging. “Just… patterns, y’know?”
“Yeah,” he said, nodding. “I get it.” They said that to each other a lot. I get it. Yeah. Me too. Same.
Sam ran past them, having already dropped a small box of books in the back seat. He was acting like it was a race. Michael smiled and Star did too. “Watch it, Sammy,” he said, but the kid had already disappeared into the house.
They dropped her stuff too and Star looked at him in the sun. Sometimes he looked worse than he had half-dead. It was a cruel thought and she tried to chase it away, but the shadows under his eyes were stubborn. Her own were long gone. Appearances were deceiving.
He smiled at her and she smiled back. Just like when they’d met a year ago, she couldn’t help herself. Nothing about him was practiced, everything came right to the surface. Maybe that was part of the problem. It had seemed briefly like the right way to be.
“Almost done,” he said, nodding his head back to the house. They’d only been at it for half an hour. “One more run?” Star had arrived to Santa Carla with one suitcase. She’d left the ironworks with one suitcase and a milk crate. She was leaving this house with enough to fill half the back of a station wagon. None of it was as heavy as she expected.
___
The apartment was small and far from the water but it was on the corner of the building. One room but two big windows. Her room in the factory had been bigger, sure, but it had no windows at all.
Star draped a gauzy scarf over one and some of the light filtered in purple. She looked around at the bags and boxes and imagined where furniture could go. She wanted a really big mirror, she’d have to find one in a thrift store somewhere.
Maybe a nice vintage clock, too. Star expected that time would start to feel a little different, spending so much of it alone. She’d used to be someone who was alone a lot. It hadn’t done great things to her, the first go around. The worst of it had burned out of her with Max’s blood, but like all good fires it hadn’t left very much behind. Ash did nothing to fill the empty landscape that had formed.
She’d been a lot of people. She’d been someone who was almost never alone, unless she’d stormed off in a righteous fury. She’d also been someone who’d seen forever in the goofy smile of a new kid on the boardwalk. She’d been someone who had named herself, once. Where had that person gone?
Star leaned her head against the wall. It didn’t have to happen all at once. Lucy had said that to her as they’d rocked on the front porch together and she’d tested out talking to a mom. She could figure it out bit by bit. She could start slow. She could be someone who said goodbye to her security deposit and painted a hundred flowers on her stark white walls.
___
A new boutique had opened on the southern end of the boardwalk a few weeks ago. Star had gone in there hoping to shoplift some new earrings but ended up hitting it off with the owner, an older woman with really long hair and not much common sense. She’d left with a job.
It was easy sometimes to forget that there was a whole other part of Santa Carla. She’d spent her whole time here in the shadowy bits, with punks or fellow addicts or literal monsters. Every time the boutique door opened she was reminded that there were women who bought seashells from a store instead of gathering them on the beach. Twice now since she’d started one of them had just stopped and taken a picture of her like she was part of the decor. Maybe if she’d known about them in the hungry days this all would have ended differently. Someone laughed at that, rich and deep, in a corner of her mind.
Maybe she’d say it to Michael later and watch his eyes go wide and hear him laugh, loud and easy, in her ears. She’d been thinking about Michael a lot lately. Too much. But that was the thing with people like her, wasn’t it? Cut out one tendency and another would grow right back in its place.
___
Nova wasn’t speaking to her this month but Cassidy was. She met Star after her shift and walked her back to the new apartment.
“Hard to picture you with a whole-ass job,” she said, and Star shook her head, laughing.
“Whole-ass new me,” she said, linking their arms together.
“I like you better without your creepy goth gang,” Cassidy said, and Star couldn’t remember what she said for the rest of the walk home. She should apologize to Nova for bailing on her birthday party. She would understand if Star could explain it just right.
“Small,” was all Cassidy said as Star unlocked the door and let her in. She rolled her eyes and clenched her teeth.
Her bed wasn’t set up yet so they fell onto the floor together. Cassidy lit a joint after and Star accepted. She had curated the list of acceptable vices carefully over the past twelve months. The okay things were weed, sex, mid-day naps, sex with Michael, and occasional shoplifting. The not okay things were cigarettes, heights, other drugs, body modification and nostalgia. She was almost at the perfect ratio of how much time she spent in her body.
Cassidy left as soon as the joint burned out and only the bitter smell remained. Star was glad to have some people in her life who never lingered.
___
“Have you asked them about putting some of the dressing room mirrors right on the shop floor?” Edgar asked from across the dinner table.
Michael put his head in his hands and Lucy smiled tightly into her salad. “Not yet, Edgar,” Star said. “Maybe once I’ve worked there more than a week?” Lucy reached under the table and squeezed her knee.
She hadn’t meant to end up at the Emerson house again for dinner, but the day had gotten away from her and she was still a few weeks away from really having grocery money.
“Yeah,” Alan said, nodding. “Good. Build up trust first.”
Lucy cleared her throat and the rest of the meal passed without any supernatural insinuations. Star’s gaze wandered, as it always did. They’d glossed over the charred outline of Dwayne with cheap white paint. It brightened the space, technically. He would have found that funny. She still never used the upstairs bathroom.
She focused back on the table and the food and told them a few stories from her day. When she got to the lady and her camera she left out the violent thoughts. Sam laughed the loudest at her story. He always did.
“Hey,” Michael said, as she pulled her boots on after dessert. “Want me to come stay the night?” His fumbling hands had become more confident in the year since it had all happened and sometimes that was good. Sometimes that was great, but it wasn’t what she wanted tonight. On the worst of nights his gentle touch felt too much like someone else’s.
“Kinda want to be alone,” Star said with a smile.
“I get it.”
___
Star resolved to stop lying. She hadn’t wanted to be alone at all. Maybe she would call Michael in the morning and tell him she’d lied, that she’d still kind of thought she could say whatever she wanted and someone would know what she really meant. “Yeah,” he’d say, “I get it,” and it would be close enough.
But would it? She looked out from her seat on the lip of the band stand, where an audience had once cheered for them. He got it the most anyone could get it, but he’d only known them a few days. Never woken up to Dwayne knocking over Paul’s drumset. Never been carried home through the air after collapsing from hunger after a show. Never locked his lips greedily onto David’s wrist, chasing away inevitability. Never really heard the way laughter echoed in the ironworks, like it had collapsed specifically for that purpose.
Star looked up and the moon was waxing. It was still early enough that the tinny music of the carousel drifted down to her. She closed her eyes and whistled softly along, leaving space for a harmony to join her. There was an art supply store between her new spot and the boutique, she’d pick up some paint tomorrow.