Lost Stars Read Free

skip-school-but-still-get-good-grades kind, the run-with-the-fast-crowd kind. I had been scrambling to keep up with her even before she was gone.
    â€œI’m just glad you’re here.” Soo lifted up her beer. Oh. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I had kept up. “Cheers.”
    Before I had even clinked her can, Justin sidled up to us. The perfect eighteen-year-old human being, Justin was a jock and an art room druggie all at once, Johnny Depp-meets-Scott Baio looks with shaggy, chestnut-colored hair and green eyes. He crouched down next to Soo and picked up her hand and stroked it. I pretended to vomit. Justin got that look, like he didn’t know if he should laugh.
    â€œOh, no—​don’t take it personally. I’ve just had too much to drink.” I raised my nearly full first beer. He still didn’t laugh. “I’m just messing with you,” I said, and lightly punched his arm.
    â€œOw,” he said. At least I’d thought it was lightly. “I’m getting another beer.”
    Soo went with him, and Greta sat with me. In her fuchsia Cyndi Lauper dress, strapless with a fluffy crepe skirt on the bottom, her Converse high-tops and her long, feathered, perfectly curly strawberry blond hair—​achieved naturally, no perm necessary—​she looked like a movie star: Kim Basinger, but somehow even prettier. Greta. She was good at tennis and still a hippie chick and a cheerleader anyway. She was so good at holding her liquor. So statuesque. How could one person be so many good things? No wonder she always had a boyfriend. Everything about her was pretty. I was wearing one of my mom’s old T-shirts with the sleeves cut off and the bottom sliced into fringes, and cutoff Lee jeans.
    â€œDrink up, kid,” she told me with that perfect smile. I’d do anything she said. So I drank, even though I much preferred my mom’s iced tea, the kind she made from the mint she grew every summer in pots on our porch. Beer no longer tasted like toe fungus (or what I thought toe fungus would taste like), but I would never actually like it. “So what’s up?”
    â€œLet’s see,” I said. “I’m currently locked in my room, as you can see.”
    â€œAh, the father,” she said.
    â€œYeah, it sucks when they pretend that they actually care about you so they can ground you.”
    â€œThat’s what they say. Luckily my dad doesn’t even pretend.”
    â€œGod, you
are
lucky,” I said, smiling at her joke. I wondered if she knew how lucky she was. I’d never met her dad, but I figured he must be wealthy and handsome and worldly and kind if he’d sired her.
    Justin and Soo stood in the corner now, holding hands, cocooned in a private world. “Mmm, young love,” Greta said, as if they were so naïve, as if she knew something they didn’t. What did she know?
    Greta had not gone a day without a boyfriend since she was twelve—​break up one day, find a new one the next. But Soo hadn’t dated much. She’d been more like me: on the sidelines, occasionally pulled into the action but never claimed. And now she was In Love.
    What did she know? What did they all know?
    Â 
    In the evening after Ginny’s funeral, Greta had retrieved me from the reception and taken me with her and Soo and their friends, driving in some older boy’s car with the windows rolled down and the soft spring air on my face, stunned and numb and comfortable in the womblike enclosure of Ginny’s friends, with Janis Joplin’s “Bye, Bye Baby” blaring through the speaker:
You just got lost somewhere out in the world,
she sang,
and you left me here to face it all alone.
I’d never heard Janis Joplin before. Her voice was sort of like sandpaper and sort of like an organ played by the goddess Athena.
    Ginny’s friends smoked and drank—​things I had not done until that night—​and we