Do The Stars Shine Out For You?
Chapter One
I woke up in the morning feeling empty, a kind of hollowness that felt like it should be accompanied with sadness, but instead there was nothing. Just the steady beat of my heart and the in-and-out motion of my breathing. Streams of early morning light filtered through the blinds and landed in stripes on the bed, patterning me in shades,
I rolled over in bed, flopping onto my chest and pressing my face into the soft pillow. The air in the bedroom was frigid, the tip of my nose and my fingers and toes feeling numb. Silence fell heavy like a curtain being pulled across a window, and it bothered me. I hated silence; it gave me way too much time to think about things I didn’t particularly want to think about. The space between being awake and falling asleep was torture.
Blindly, I groped my hand over the cold sheets, looking for the iPod that had fallen off my head as I went to sleep. I found it at the foot of the bed, headphones tangled up and nearly dead because it had been playing all night. I popped them in to here the gentle sounds of Asleep by the Smiths being played. A pressure I hadn’t realized was there lifted off my shoulders, and I sat up in bed and stretched.
The door to my room burst open, and my roommate – I mean flatmate, I was going to have to get used to that term – ran into the room and air dived onto my bed, bouncing me right off and onto the cold wooden flooring.
“You’re finally awake, Linnie?” She said in a bright, bubbly voice. I noticed that she was already dressed and ready to face the day, and I grimaced. I didn’t want to leave the apartment today, I wanted to walk the ten or fifteen feet to the warm and cozy couch in the living room and park myself there with a Doctor Who marathon, I had just gotten the new series on DVD and I wasn’t going to ignore it.
Carah, noticing my reaction, set her jaw and got a steely look in her eye, prepared to fight me tooth and nail on this. “Come on, Lin, you’re only going to be in London for half the year and I don’t want you to spend it all cooped up in the flat.”
“To answer your questions, yes, I’m awake, and yes, I wanted to stay in today but if a certain someone provides me with caffeine before dragging me all over the whole of London, maybe I’ll comply.” I smiled at her, and then pulled myself up off the ground and slid across the floor in my socks to the closet. In the mirror on the door, I could see Carah doing a little victory dance.
“Thank you thank you thank you!” She said happily, crushing me in a hug before sauntering smugly out of the room, satisfied with her success.
In the closet, I pulled out a pair of dark blue skinny jeans and plain white peasant top. It was loose and comfortable and just right for an outing on the town, I thought. I rummaged around my half-unpacked suitcases for my tan sandals, and actually found them under the bed. They were worn and each one had my footprint indented into the sole, but they were comfortable.
I did a quick once over before pulling on a jacket to fight the early morning chill, and grabbed my bag, slinging it across my body to rest safely at my hip. My life was in that bag; my notebook filled with words and my cell phone in case I needed to Google something for a story. A dozen or so pens, ball point and fountain, gathered at the bottom like a grave for lost writing utensils. And I can’t forget my chargers, because as much as I love my phone and iPod, the battery life sucks.
After brushing my teeth, I joined Carah in the living room, where she was waiting impatiently and tapping furiously onto her touch screen phone. Carah’s my best friend; we’d gone to school together when she still lived in America until about tenth grade, when her mom took a promotion that required a move to London, painfully reducing us from seeing each other every day to only a few times a year and millions of Skype calls. But we did it, and now, having just graduated high school myself, I was finally allowed to spend six months here with her in her flat, catching up and remembering old times and creating new memories.
Or at least, that was the reason I told my mother and father. I wanted to see Carah more than anything in the world, but I couldn’t stay in that house for more than a second after I was handed my diploma. The environment I had grown up in grew toxic all too fast. It was as if someone had slipped poison in an otherwise pure well. The poison, in this case, was my father.
A torrent of bad thoughts hit me all at once, and I slipped in an ear bud and shrugged it off. I wasn’t going to let that ruin my day with Carah. She deserved a decent outing with me. I was well aware that I hadn’t been very pleasant as of late.
The basic issue is that I’m sad. Very sad, and tired nearly all the time but unable to get more than a few hours of sleep. Ever since Carah moved away, I’d been retreating into myself, spending more and more time with words and worlds that were built upon them, in my own sort of solidarity that was the beginning of my self-destruction. I knew, and Carah knew, that if I didn’t stop retreating into the fantasy world so often, one day I might not come back up.
It was hard to stop.
“Something wrong?” I asked quietly, raising an eyebrow at her irritated demeanor.
“Work called in,” She replied angrily. “I told them I wanted the week off, but here we are, on a goddamned Tuesday, and they’re asking me to come in.” Carah looked up from her phone at me, sadness painted on her face with a sincere hand. Her eyes were apologetic. “Do you mind coming with me? I already woke you up and maybe I can get out of work early. I’ll buy you coffee for the entire week!”
I twisted my fingers nervously in my long, wavy dark brown hair, and fumbled with the strap of my bag. Carah worked as an assistant for some popular group she refused to tell me the name of. I was probably going to spend all day out of my element, surrounded by bustling and busy people who dealt with other people as their profession. Large crowds of anything made me nervous, and new people tended to render me mute. Give me a notebook, and I could write you a novel. Put me on a stage and tell me to give a speech, and I’d faint dead away.
I gave her a small smile, one that didn’t reach my eyes, and grabbed the door handle. “I’m expecting a coffee and a doughnut to compensate for my future suffering, Car,” I said, and she jumped up and squealed.
Hurriedly, she pulled me out the door and to the Starbucks that sat on a street corner a few blocks away. The green and white sign glinted in the rising sunlight, and I could taste the frappuccino on my lips already.
Carah claimed a spot on a line of anxious people who just wanted their coffee so they could be on their merry way to work, and I sat at a table in the back beside a large glass window. I jotted down a few words every now and then if inspiration struck, enjoying the soft music that was ever-present in my ear.
“Here you go,” Carah said as she returned with a coffee tray and a folded up paper bag. “One glazed doughnut and a frappuccino for Linnie Gordon.” We sat for a bit and munched our doughnuts and sipped our coffees in a comfortable silence when a thought suddenly occurred to me.
“Car, who is it that you work for again?”
A devious look glinted in her eyes, and a wide smile spread across her face. Almost immediately I dreaded what the answer could possibly be.
“I work for One Direction.”
I rolled over in bed, flopping onto my chest and pressing my face into the soft pillow. The air in the bedroom was frigid, the tip of my nose and my fingers and toes feeling numb. Silence fell heavy like a curtain being pulled across a window, and it bothered me. I hated silence; it gave me way too much time to think about things I didn’t particularly want to think about. The space between being awake and falling asleep was torture.
Blindly, I groped my hand over the cold sheets, looking for the iPod that had fallen off my head as I went to sleep. I found it at the foot of the bed, headphones tangled up and nearly dead because it had been playing all night. I popped them in to here the gentle sounds of Asleep by the Smiths being played. A pressure I hadn’t realized was there lifted off my shoulders, and I sat up in bed and stretched.
The door to my room burst open, and my roommate – I mean flatmate, I was going to have to get used to that term – ran into the room and air dived onto my bed, bouncing me right off and onto the cold wooden flooring.
“You’re finally awake, Linnie?” She said in a bright, bubbly voice. I noticed that she was already dressed and ready to face the day, and I grimaced. I didn’t want to leave the apartment today, I wanted to walk the ten or fifteen feet to the warm and cozy couch in the living room and park myself there with a Doctor Who marathon, I had just gotten the new series on DVD and I wasn’t going to ignore it.
Carah, noticing my reaction, set her jaw and got a steely look in her eye, prepared to fight me tooth and nail on this. “Come on, Lin, you’re only going to be in London for half the year and I don’t want you to spend it all cooped up in the flat.”
“To answer your questions, yes, I’m awake, and yes, I wanted to stay in today but if a certain someone provides me with caffeine before dragging me all over the whole of London, maybe I’ll comply.” I smiled at her, and then pulled myself up off the ground and slid across the floor in my socks to the closet. In the mirror on the door, I could see Carah doing a little victory dance.
“Thank you thank you thank you!” She said happily, crushing me in a hug before sauntering smugly out of the room, satisfied with her success.
In the closet, I pulled out a pair of dark blue skinny jeans and plain white peasant top. It was loose and comfortable and just right for an outing on the town, I thought. I rummaged around my half-unpacked suitcases for my tan sandals, and actually found them under the bed. They were worn and each one had my footprint indented into the sole, but they were comfortable.
I did a quick once over before pulling on a jacket to fight the early morning chill, and grabbed my bag, slinging it across my body to rest safely at my hip. My life was in that bag; my notebook filled with words and my cell phone in case I needed to Google something for a story. A dozen or so pens, ball point and fountain, gathered at the bottom like a grave for lost writing utensils. And I can’t forget my chargers, because as much as I love my phone and iPod, the battery life sucks.
After brushing my teeth, I joined Carah in the living room, where she was waiting impatiently and tapping furiously onto her touch screen phone. Carah’s my best friend; we’d gone to school together when she still lived in America until about tenth grade, when her mom took a promotion that required a move to London, painfully reducing us from seeing each other every day to only a few times a year and millions of Skype calls. But we did it, and now, having just graduated high school myself, I was finally allowed to spend six months here with her in her flat, catching up and remembering old times and creating new memories.
Or at least, that was the reason I told my mother and father. I wanted to see Carah more than anything in the world, but I couldn’t stay in that house for more than a second after I was handed my diploma. The environment I had grown up in grew toxic all too fast. It was as if someone had slipped poison in an otherwise pure well. The poison, in this case, was my father.
A torrent of bad thoughts hit me all at once, and I slipped in an ear bud and shrugged it off. I wasn’t going to let that ruin my day with Carah. She deserved a decent outing with me. I was well aware that I hadn’t been very pleasant as of late.
The basic issue is that I’m sad. Very sad, and tired nearly all the time but unable to get more than a few hours of sleep. Ever since Carah moved away, I’d been retreating into myself, spending more and more time with words and worlds that were built upon them, in my own sort of solidarity that was the beginning of my self-destruction. I knew, and Carah knew, that if I didn’t stop retreating into the fantasy world so often, one day I might not come back up.
It was hard to stop.
“Something wrong?” I asked quietly, raising an eyebrow at her irritated demeanor.
“Work called in,” She replied angrily. “I told them I wanted the week off, but here we are, on a goddamned Tuesday, and they’re asking me to come in.” Carah looked up from her phone at me, sadness painted on her face with a sincere hand. Her eyes were apologetic. “Do you mind coming with me? I already woke you up and maybe I can get out of work early. I’ll buy you coffee for the entire week!”
I twisted my fingers nervously in my long, wavy dark brown hair, and fumbled with the strap of my bag. Carah worked as an assistant for some popular group she refused to tell me the name of. I was probably going to spend all day out of my element, surrounded by bustling and busy people who dealt with other people as their profession. Large crowds of anything made me nervous, and new people tended to render me mute. Give me a notebook, and I could write you a novel. Put me on a stage and tell me to give a speech, and I’d faint dead away.
I gave her a small smile, one that didn’t reach my eyes, and grabbed the door handle. “I’m expecting a coffee and a doughnut to compensate for my future suffering, Car,” I said, and she jumped up and squealed.
Hurriedly, she pulled me out the door and to the Starbucks that sat on a street corner a few blocks away. The green and white sign glinted in the rising sunlight, and I could taste the frappuccino on my lips already.
Carah claimed a spot on a line of anxious people who just wanted their coffee so they could be on their merry way to work, and I sat at a table in the back beside a large glass window. I jotted down a few words every now and then if inspiration struck, enjoying the soft music that was ever-present in my ear.
“Here you go,” Carah said as she returned with a coffee tray and a folded up paper bag. “One glazed doughnut and a frappuccino for Linnie Gordon.” We sat for a bit and munched our doughnuts and sipped our coffees in a comfortable silence when a thought suddenly occurred to me.
“Car, who is it that you work for again?”
A devious look glinted in her eyes, and a wide smile spread across her face. Almost immediately I dreaded what the answer could possibly be.
“I work for One Direction.”
8/3/13