Constellation

Star doesn’t know how long she’s been in Santa Carla — maybe she was born here. Maybe she had a boardwalk father and a boardwalk mother just passing through. She didn’t have to go far to find trouble.

Her Missing poster is papered over before the month is out — lost dog, stolen bike. It was a bad picture and hadn’t photocopied well — Star, miserable, with braces and hennaed hair. The henna had come out in the ocean, just before dawn, and the dye tracked down her shoulders in red rivulets, like blood. It was after the first night, when she drank what David gave her and tasted blood — the old Star, washed away.

The raucousness stopped cold, no more shouting, Paul and Marko ceased pretending to drown each other — all of them self-conscious of their stares in a way even Star could feel, but still staring. She’d done something she wasn’t supposed to, and now look. Nice girls stay on the boardwalk.

David waded in to get her, and wrapped her in his coat — the cloth smelled like wet dog, like the little glass bottles of voodoo oils they sell on the boardwalk, and she hadn’t felt exposed, even soaking-wet in a white slip dress and bare feet. He’d carried her down into the ruined foundations and what came after that, she won’t remember. She slept on the ground, on that coat.

Her hair had spread out in her sleep and dried in full dark curls, still stiff with salt; her dress had rinsed immaculate white in the surf and Star had resolved to be a different girl than before — had asked David how long she could stay there in the ruins, and David had spread his arms like a prince and said, forever.

*

Maybe she came to town.

Lots of girls thumb their way toward California, most run aground — aiming for Beverly Hills or the Haight and flaring out somewhere on the roadside, vanishing in the dark. Some drivers were decent and some weren’t. One of the good ones took her right to the edge of town, played a Springsteen tape she hadn’t heard before and bought her a hot dog and a Coke without staring at her chest, but he’d left her there. This wasn’t Los Angeles and it wasn’t San Francisco. Santa Carla just was.

There were no boys then, just girls, other girls who shared their cigarettes and tolerated her long skirts and the sound of her name. Dangling cigarettes, pierced ears and busted snub noses, airbrushed tee shirts and boys’ jeans and bleachy hair — they’d share combs and pick a fight over nothing, scatter and regroup. They’d split a carry-out hamburger a half-dozen ways, sucking the grease off their fingertips, and they’d swear at men. Just girls, hanging around the bus terminal looking hell-bent or roaming from bonfire to bonfire on the beach. Nocturnal pack activity.

There had been three other girls on the sidewalk, huddling close, sleeping in shifts — and then two, and then one, peeling off looking for a ride or a meal and never coming back. Maybe it was a good sign. Maybe they found a place.

A long-haired boy shows Esther-Star how to ride on the back of a motorbike, how to lace her hands around his waist until her knuckles ache from the vibrations and hold on. It doesn’t feel dangerous then, the same way climbing into the cab of a truck no longer felt dangerous — like walking at night. She’s impervious now.

When her ride came, she took it.

*

Maybe she never left. Michael left for UC Santa Diego with a pierced ear and a high school transcript, and never came back — there he’ll find some other passel of ragged boys and handsome girls to shore up what he’d like to be. Sam stays for a while, gingerly tolerant, and Lucy makes her up a room in the room that used to be Michael’s, lets her sleep the day out on Michael’s pillowcases and stub her toes on Michael’s castoff weights. The Frog brothers never move out of Santa Carla, and ask a lot of prying personal questions. Laddie doesn’t stay; he was never hers to keep, and the last time she sees him someone else has cut his hair.

She thinks of scenarios where she could have kept both of them — where she could have had Michael, and Michael could have had David, a circle with no end, a geometric knot. Michael and David, light and dark, sweet and bitter. If they’d stayed, could the three of them have lasted? Was there a place in the rules for life without Max? She can remember both of them, separately and together, but it’s no more than a memory.

The video store is a camera store now. Lucy rents the space for cheap and Star manages the stockroom. She doesn’t know the first thing about what they’re doing, two women who’ve stumbled into business together through sheer sick luck — maybe the line between past and present is especially thin there, she can see it sometimes on Lucy’s face, the flinch of memory. There’ll be other men who express interest in Lucy, big-hearted old hippies and arcade owners who say man a lot while professing their admiration of responsible older women. But Star remains Star, alone.