Kiss the Morning Star by Elissa Janine Hoole Read Free Book Online Page B

I am surrounded by robots who speak to me in unintelligible beeping. Or sometimes I dream of Katy, doing my homework for me like she did in real life after the fire. When she hands me the page, it’s covered from top to bottom with neat, red tally marks. Sometimes I try to count them. What do they stand for? Probably it’s how many times I kept her at a distance when I should have shared. Like best friends do.
    She tried. All those months she tried; she stopped by with her armloads of books and drawings she made for me, an old guitar she bought at a thrift store, her face full of complexity. I answered the door, stood and shuffled my feet, until finally she retreated, walking away from our red dust apartment and the train tracks and the sadness.
    “Katy?” I listen in the dark. Kat doesn’t answer, but I can hear more of the soft sounds that woke me. “Are you crying?”
    She only sniffles. “Go back to sleep.”
    “I wasn’t sleeping.” Tiny movements on the mattress—she is crying. Kat never cries. “Um, are you okay?” I find Kat’s shoulder and pat it awkwardly. Her back is to me; she’s coiled into herself. My hand feels stiff and stupid on her back. I’ve never been good at this, at touching other people. Kat is the hugger—the hand-holder, the comforter. I give encouragement best in the form of…oh, I don’t know. I mean, nothing I did worked for my dad.
    Except. The text he sent back.
    Woke before the sun today. Called Gran with birds singing in the backyard.
    “Nothing’s wrong,” whispers Kat. She rolls, trapping my arm underneath her, burrowing her head into my shoulder. “I dunno,” she says. “It’s been a weird couple of days so far.” True, that.
    I feel my heart compressed again, fluttering madly behind glass, this time more like a panicky fly trapped in a window. “Did we hit one of those guys, Kat? Really, you can tell me. I can take it. Did we kill someone?” I can’t take it. I wish she had called the police from that diner, I really do.
    Kat starts to shake again, but this time she’s laughing. Hard. She props up her head on her hand, still on top of my arm—close to me, so close. “Anna, how many times do I have to tell you? It was a chunk of dirt.” She can’t even go on for a moment because she’s laughing so hard. I feel like an idiot. “There was a little bump in the road, that’s all. I saw it before I turned off the lights, silly. It wasn’t a person, I promise.”
    Quickly—so quickly I have no time to respond—Kat leans in and kisses me. She tastes of toothpaste and tears. “You’re so cute, Anna babe,” she says, pulling away. “I’m sorry I woke you with my stupid crying. I…maybe I’m homesick.”
    Just like that, her breathing settles, falling into the slow rhythm of sleep, or nearly so. For a while I lie awake in the Shepherd’s guest room, one hand on the bed beside me, feeling the warm spot where Kat had been, and the other softly resting on my own mouth. Finally, giving my fingers a little kiss—the kiss I did not return—I let my hand fall away, and I think for the first time in years about Meggie Dempsey’s twelfth birthday party, where Katy and I were the only girls to choose Dare instead of Truth.
     
     
    “All right, we’re saving the Dares for last,” Meggie announced after Katy chose, and then all the other girls went around and chose Truth. One by one, they shared secrets about the boys they liked and whether or not they had their period yet. All the while, Katy sat smiling and waiting, her dark eyes moving from girl to girl. Finally it was my turn.
    “Dare.” It was Katy’s eyes that made me say it, dark and blue and interesting . I wanted her to be my best friend.
    All the girls moved their heads in close, smothering giggles behind their hands. They huddled around the little table at the front of the camper, peeking at us over their shoulders, rocking with laughter.
    Katy touched my arm, her hand warm and reassuring.