Lost Stars or What Lou Reed Taught Me About Love - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1471406199 ISBN 13: 9781471406195

Publisher: Hot Key Books

Synopsis

Lost Stars or What Lou Reed Taught Me About Love

About this title

About the Author

Lisa Selin Davis is originally from Saratoga Springs, N.Y., where she spent summers playing and listening to music with her (older) friends and riding her bike. She has written articles for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Timemagazine and many other publications. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, two kids, and a very old cat. Follow Lisa on Twitter: @LisaSelinDavis

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

“THAT’S THE LAST TIME,” MY FATHER YELLED, pounding the arm of his flowered dusty-rose armchair. “I mean it—​I’m not gonna take this crap anymore. This is no way to start the summer.”
     “What are you gonna do about it?” I yelled back, stomping up the stairs and slamming my door. The room buzzed with the electricity of our screams, and my hands shook as I placed the record on the turntable: the Replacements singing “Unsatisfied.” I let the sweet, sad sound of the guitar calm me down. The joint helped too.
     “Carrie, put that out.” His voice rode the line between pleading and pissed. “I can smell it from down here.”
     I flung open the door. “I stole it from you,” I yelled down the stairs. “You’re such a hypocrite.”
     “Caraway—”
     “Don’t call me that! It’s Carrie!” I knew I was screaming so loud that the neighbors in the giant house next door could probably hear me, but that only made me scream louder, so loud my voice began to crack. “Why did you guys have to name me after a loaf of rye bread?” I stomped down the stairs and threw one of my jelly shoes at him, and he ducked. Then he stopped. He just stood there, stunned and irate, his whole face descended into blankness, as if he had sudden-onset Alzheimer’s and didn’t know anymore who he was or who I was or how we had gotten there. Which was probably the case.
     I was still heaving with all that anger, breathing hard. It welled up in me sometimes, a fiery asteroid of it. It just took over in my bones. But when he froze, I did too. We stared at each other for a minute, and then it was as if he crumbled, his whole six-foot frame collapsing into that armchair, the one that had become his makeshift home since our family fell apart. I could hardly hear him, he was whispering so low. So I had to step closer. And then closer.
     “We didn’t name you after rye bread,” he was saying. “It’s a spice.”
     He looked up at me, and I thought for a second he was going to reach up and hug me, and a terrible pool of feeling, not one particular feeling but just a messy stew of everything, started flooding me, and I felt like I had to throw something or break something or cut something or smoke something, and I let out an enormous grunt, like a white dwarf star, collapsed and out of gas.
     He put his head into his hands and started whispering again. He was saying, “I just don’t know what to do with you. I don’t know how to help you. It’s getting worse, and I don’t know what to do.”

What he did was ground me. I had arrived home reeking of cigarettes and pot, nearly falling into the house at six p.m. when I was supposed to be at work ringing up fingerless gloves and neon half shirts at Dot’s Duds. I’d never shown up, and most likely Dot had called him. Most likely I’d been fired. Again. This was, as he’d said, no way to start the summer.
     So he laid down the law: no going out with friends. No walking downtown to buy records. No going to Soo’s, where I was supposed to be by nine o’clock. Worst of all: no going up to the roof to monitor the progress of the Vira comet, otherwise known as 11P/Alexandrov, which any day now would blast through the sky, this ball of ice and dust that grew a tail of gas when it neared the sun, as it would this summer for the first time since 1890. It only came around every ninety-seven years.
     I was eleven when my parents first took me and my sisters up to the observatory to see Mars at opposition—​when the planet is closest to Earth and all lit up by the sun, a beautiful, almost orchestral eruption of light. Even then, before the accident, something about the laws of the universe made so much more sense to me than shop class and school dances and the elusive species known as boys. The story of how Earth hangs there in the sky, tied to the sun but always turning away, day after day, as if trying to escape: that was a story I understood. Unlike my family, which even then seemed to have some green patina of dysfunction—​translucent, but always there—​that pure, rule-bound vision I saw through my telescope made all the sense in the world.
     The telescope, unfortunately, had disappeared about three months ago, just before my mom took off and things went from worse to worst. Punishment for another one of the terrible things I’d done, I assumed, but I still had the roof. Until now. “You have to at least let me up there,” I begged my father. “It’s a once-in-a-lifetime thing. Maybe twice if I live to be a hundred and thirteen. Or three times if I hit two ten.”
     I thought I saw a smile creeping to the corners of his lips—the roof had been our spot, once upon a time, the telescope our shared obsession. But he just said, “Add it to the list of life’s disappointments.”
     I stomped back upstairs and blasted X’s “Real Child of Hell,” collapsing on my bed, pulling the star sheets that my mom had bought me years ago up over my head. My mom wouldn’t have punished me. My mom would have defended me, saying, Paul, sweetie, lay off—​she’s just a teenager. Let’s let her be. Let’s choose to trust her. But maybe she’d learned not to say that kind of thing anymore.
     Since there was no talking on the phone, I couldn’t even tell Soo of this next level of injustice (she was the only one to whom I revealed my secret nerd-dom) or that I couldn’t show up at her house that night. Impossible to sneak it, either, because we were a one-phone household, just our touchtone mounted to the wall in the kitchen, the beige plastic smudged from how often Rosie and I talked on it, and fought over it. My dad had had to replace it twice in the last year, after I ripped it from the wall in one of what he called my “fits.”
     Now Rosie was standing outside my locked door, yelling, “Turn it down, please—​I’m trying to study!” Rosie was the only person I knew who went to summer school voluntarily.
     “You should stop studying and have some fun,” I called, kind of meaning it. Every once in a while I liked Rosie. Now was not one of those times. “School’s out, for crying out loud.”
     “You should stop having so much fun and start studying,” she yelled back.
     I put the Pixies EP on the turntable and used all of my concentration to place the needle on the record and pretend I couldn’t hear her through the door.
     “I wish you would just leave, Carrie!” Her footsteps receded down the hallway.
     Why hadn’t I thought of that?
     “Great idea!” I called out. If my father caught me, I’d just tell him Rosie had told me to go. At some point in our family history, Rosie would have to do something wrong. My sneaking suspicion was that Rosie was normal because they had given her a normal name. It was still a spice—​Rosemary—​but it passed as regular. Ginny, too. Most people hadn’t known that her real name was Ginger until they saw it on her gravestone, and even then, it wasn’t that strange. But call your kid Caraway and bad shit is bound to happen.
     My window screen clicked as I slid it open and did a perfunctory check for parental patrol. My father wasn’t outside, and there was just enough cover from the pine trees next door to form a kind of protective canopy.
     We lived on a narrow street of humble, and sometimes crumbling, little Victorian houses that hid behind a wide boulevard called Grand Street. Our town had once been a resort for fancy New Yorkers, but now it was mostly run-down except for the pockets of wealth, one of which happened to be right next to us. Grand was full of mansions, thus constantly reminding us of our station in life back here. Our little house—​four tiny bedrooms, low ceilings, asbestos siding—​was in the shadow of Mrs. Richmond’s place, a big white house with huge columns, separated from us by a high picket fence. I almost never saw Mrs. Richmond herself—​she reportedly had a multitude of houses—​but that was a good thing; it meant she never caught me when I snuck out.
     I slithered out the window and onto the roof of the porch, then scaled down the porch column and onto the bricked-over dirt we called a yard. Pretty amazing for someone whose only exercise was adjusting telescope lenses (before they were taken away) and playing guitar.
     In the clear, I took out my Camel Lights and puffed all the way to Soo’s. It was June and the perfect temperature, that velvety kind of early evening air, that fading golden light. It all made a weird hard ball in the center of my chest and I wished I had my guitar. Or another joint. Or that it was already late at night and I was heading to a bus stop somewhere on the outskirts of town with my guitar slung over my shoulder and it would turn out that my life was actually a movie, some small-town Breakfast Club kind of deal where there were happy endings all around. And boyfriends. My kingdom—​or really, my crappy house—​for a boyfriend.

When I got to Soo’s, the partying was in full swing. Soo’s dad owned a bar downtown—​a skeevy but apparently very lucrative biker bar in which we were never allowed to set foot—​and was never home at night. Her mom, well, she was usually too intoxicated herself to even come down to the basement to check on us. “One of the world’s few female Korean-American drunks,” Soo often noted.
     Soo had a finished basement that she’d done up all 1970s: fake wood paneling, red pleather couch, a killer sound system, a mirror ball—​the kind of stuff rich kids had, but which I, through the miracle of Soo’s generosity and our family tragedy, had access to. It was like having our own discotheque, even though nobody liked disco anymore. Or, well, almost nobody. Secretly I still loved “I Will Survive,” my favorite song when I was six.
     The boys were all there, including Tommy Patarami and Tiger Alvarez and Justin Banks, and they’d set up a couple of amps and mikes and a drum kit in the back of the room. The guys were standing in front of Soo’s dad’s enormous wall of records, picking out what to play. “The Ghost in You” by the Psychedelic Furs was on. I did my goofy dance, sort of the-twist-meets-mosh—​I was not that into the Psychedelic Furs—​and Tommy yelled, “What’s up, Rye Bread?” and I laughed, even though I hated when he called me that. “Not much, Pastrami,” I said, and someone else said, “She got you, Patarami.” There was nothing better than making people laugh. Well, almost nothing better. I was pretty sure a couple of things were better.
     “Carrie!” Soo and Greta left the scrum of half-intoxicated boys to greet me, handing me a beer and huddling around me like the world’s prettiest football players. I could smell the sticky sweet scent of Soo’s mousse, and I was semi-suffocating inside their group hug and pushing them away, but only lightly. Some part of me just wanted to stay in there forever. “Our little Carrie is here!”
     “Yay,” I said, my normal deadpan. “Let the rejoicing begin.”
     I was sixteen, going into eleventh grade, and they had all just graduated, as Ginny would have too. These used to be her friends, and then, in her absence, they were mine; I had been subsumed by her world. The only thing I missed about my old life was astronomy club. At this point, I no longer had any extracurricular activities other than songwriting and amateur drug taking. And who would do that with me when they were gone at the end of summer, off to their new lives at college? It would be like losing my sister all over again.
     “They’re not going to play, are they?” I asked Soo, nodding at Justin, who was standing in front of his Flying V guitar, as we sank into the red pleather couch. I’d always thought that was a dumb-looking guitar. “They suck, you know. And they have the worst band name in history.”
     “Piece of Toast isn’t that bad.”
     “It’s always a bad idea to name your band while tripping,” I said.
     “Well, they might play,” Soo said. “Depends on if my mom passes out or not. She’s been complaining about the noise. Apparently alcohol does not dull your hearing.”
     The boys didn’t bother coming over. Tommy buried his face in a pile of records. I hadn’t seen him since he’d shoved his fingers up me in an attempt at something vaguely sexual, which had happened on the football field when we got wasted the weekend before. It seemed he had decided to pretty much ignore me, which was fine, so I traced the rim of my beer can with my fingertip and tried to look bored so I wouldn’t look unmoored, as if I were in danger of drifting off the couch and out of orbit, holding on to the upholstery buttons for dear life. It wasn’t like I liked Tommy anyway. We were just the only two perpetually single people in the group.
     Soo tossed her hair back, her perfect pearl earrings sparkling. “So what’s with the fashionable lateness?” She took an expert sip of her beer. Mine was sweating on the table.
     “I was waiting outside for the butler to present me,” I said. “Wait—​this isn’t my coming-out party? The debutante’s ball? Huh.”
     Occasionally Soo was immune to my humor. “I wasn’t even sure if you were going to show.” She wasn’t looking at me, a sign that she was hurt that I was so late, that I hadn’t even called.
     “I wasn’t allowed to leave my room!” I said, and I was already so raw and tired that the flood started coming, my hands in parted prayer position, reaching into the air. Heading toward a fit. “Not all of us have parents who don’t have any rules!”
     “Okay, Car—​it’s okay.” She grabbed my hands from the air and brought them back down, spreading my fingers out on the sticky fabric. She always knew how to calm the wave. “What happened?”
     I pressed my hands against the pleather until my heartbeat slowed. I gulped my beer. “Eh, just the usual.” The beer was warm, but I drank it anyway because Greta and Soo and the rest of them were drinking it, and they were my real family, the collective Daddy Warbucks to my orphan Annie.
     “You know, a little parental freak-out and some Spider-Man-style escape.”
     I wanted to tell Soo about the fight with my dad, but sometimes it seemed like the past couple of years weren’t real. That wasn’t me screaming a...

About this edition

• Publisher: Hot Key Books
• ISBN 10: 1471406199
• ISBN 13: 9781471406195
• Binding: Paperback