Eight The Electric Fields

The doors of the rusty yellow VW wagon grunt when we open them.

“Where the fuck are we?” Stella says.

I slide out of the front and let her out of the back. She stands there gawking as B’Rad gathers up his things.

“What is this?” she asks more directly this time.

“What is what?” He throws his messenger bag over his shoulder, manually locking the driver’s-side door before shutting it.

It’s warm out, but there’s a chill punching through the air.

“I mean, what the hell is this? All of this,” she says again, gesturing. “What is that?”

“It’s a pontoon boat,” he tells her, like it should be self-explanatory.

“Okay, but—”

“It’s where I live.”

“You live on a boat?”

“Depending on how bad monsoon season is,” he tells her.

I didn’t know about the boat either, but I’m not about to make a thing of it.

“So, who lives in that shitty house right there?” Stella asks.

“Nice,” I say. “Real tactful.”

“It belongs to my shitty granddad,” he tells her, and that’s when I hear it. That thing people do. That voice thing. Not really a lie, but maybe an omission. If you’re paying attention, you can hear the space between half-truths that incubates secrets like a cocoon.

“So, your granddad lives in that house,” Stella presses, “while you’re out here freezing your sprouts off on this boat?”

“It’s not that bad,” B’Rad says. “I have a space heater.”

“Safety hazard,” she mumbles, following his lead by hiking herself up onto the boat’s platform. She goes, “Where do you take a whiz?”

I mouth I’m sorry to B’Rad, but Stella just says, “I saw that, Daya. Don’t assign an apology to me.” She turns back to him. “I can actually pee standing up if I’m in a bind. Now that’s a skill.”

He pretends he doesn’t hear her. He says, “There’s a bathroom in the cabin, but it’s not hooked up to anything.”

“So, you do your business in the house, or what?”

He lifts his chin and signals a cluster of dry brush next to the boat.

“I just hang it over the side and aim for those,” he says.

“Thanks for the visual,” I mumble to no one in particular.

Stella nods knowingly, says, “Hmm. What about number two?”

“Stel-la.”I make face at her. “It’s already been a weird night. I don’t want to hear about anyone’s shit habits right now.”

“Fair game.” She keeps walking around the boat, surveying it like it’s a used car she’s thinking of buying. “I just never heard of a dude living on dry land in a pontoon boat before, so there you go. Something new every day.”

She leans against the rickety metal railing, stares out across B’Rad’s granddad’s junkyard. Some of the old bottles and jars, strips of metal, gas cans, and broken car windows gleam so deceptively in the moonlight, you’d almost believe you were on some kind of treasure island instead of a homegrown landfill.

B’Rad disappears inside the dinky cabin for a beat, roots around before coming back out with a couple sleeping bags and one of those space-age emergency blankets that makes you look like a to-go burrito wrapped in aluminum foil. He starts unzipping and laying out the sleeping bags across the deck, and I come over to help. Stella just stares out across the yard like she’s floating away from the mothership, untethered.

Eventually, she pushes back from the railing to join us, and for a while, no one talks. It’s actually kind of nice.

“You okay?” I lean in and ask after she drops next to me on the sleeping bag.

“It’s dark out here,” she says instead of answering.

“Definitely the best place to see the stars,” B’Rad half whispers, like he’s gone somewhere else too.

Stella lets out a deep exhale as she looks up.

She goes, “Damn. That’s intense.”

I put my hands under my head, and she rests her head in the bend of my arm, and thousands of millions of light-years above us, entire galaxies spread out like spilled sugar. All those stars and planets and solar systems, invisible to the bare eye, spinning their versions of days and years. Trusting us to believe they’re out there, even if we can’t see them.

“You wanted confirmation of how petty and insignificant everything is,” I say as we look up. “There you go.”

The soundtrack of frogs and crickets cues up cinematically.

“But also?” B’Rad says. “There are so many shooting stars out here, it’s actually kind of cool. Like a magic show that goes on all night.”

“You don’t get any more shooting stars than anyone else does, Be Weird,” Stella says. “You just see more of them because it’s so fucking dark out here.”

“Doesn’t matter,” I say. “It’s all just a trick.”

Stella shifts. “What do you mean?”

“They’re not actually stars. They’re bits of dust and rock burning up when they hit the atmosphere.”

She goes, “Wait, so when we make a wish on a falling star, we’re really just wishing on a rock? That’s bogus.”

“You have a sixty percent probability of seeing one if you watch the sky for just thirty minutes,” B’Rad tells her. “That’s not bad odds, if you think about it.”

“It’s terrible odds,” Stella says. “Would you go to a concert if you only had a sixty percent chance of seeing the band?”

“Can we just talk about how all those rocks had a chance to escape earth’s atmosphere, to get out into the universe and do something bigger, maybe become a planet someday, only to burn out because they tried to come back?”

Stella and B’Rad turn to me like a synchronized boy band.

Stella goes, “Dude. Where you been hiding that edge all this time?”

“And here I thought I was the only one filled with existential angst,” B’Rad says. “What else you got swirling around in there, Daya?”

I look over at B’Rad, who’s still stretched out flat on his back.

“You’re the chillest dude I know,” I tell him. “If you’re filled with anything, it’s a creamy center. Like a Twinkie.”

“Happy people are the scariest people,” Stella says. “They’ve got the most skeletons.”

“Everyone has skeletons,” B’Rad murmurs. “I don’t care how happy or sad they are.”

“See?” Stella says. “I told you. Bones—lots of ’em. They’re probably all buried out in this yard too.”

I think about the urn he dug out of this junk heap on Saturday, and shudder against Stella’s words.

But B’Rad just keeps looking up, like the map of stars is more familiar to him than the landscape of junk stretched out around him, teeming with long-forgotten memories. Like if he could just lift off into the cosmos, he’d never have to think about whose stuff this all once was, or what memories were attached to any of it.

With Stella’s head cradled in the bend of my arm, we both look up too. I don’t know what’s on her mind—probably some deep, dark existential meanderings. I’m just looking for shooting stars. Even though I know they’re not stars. And they’re not so much shooting as falling. But they’re out there, doing all they can to be seen for a moment. To be known for what they are, even if most people want to make them into something else.

There’s a loud crash inside the house that jolts the two of us completely upright. But B’Rad just lies there, looking up at the sky as a string of chilling utterances weaves through the lattice-covered windows and floats past us.

“Goddamn sonsabitches!” the old man inside hollers.

B’Rad slowly sits up, clears his throat, shoots eye-bullets against the side of the house.

“I can take you wherever you need to go,” he offers.

Something lingering between his words makes leaving now the only option.

As we hop down from the boat, the shouting gets louder, more combative. Stella hustles ahead of us to the car. No wonder—she had way more than her share of belligerent screaming in the four years her mom was married to Richard Howell.

When she climbs into the back seat, I realize I never locked my door. B’Rad and I both start our I’m sorrys at the same time, but I stop, and he follows all the way through on his.

“Sorry about that. He’s just... I mean... he’s not—”

“It’s cool. Really. I’m just glad we got to chill out here for a while.”

“Right.”

“No, I mean it.”

I lean out the open window as we ease down the driveway. Look up. Think about shooting stars and space dust. I think about B’Rad’s granddad, and the fact that B’Rad would rather live on a pontoon boat than in that house, where he’d have to listen to a drunken tirade every night. B’Rad talks about other places. About going somewhere different from here. I pray to God he never becomes a shooting star. I pray that B’Rad can be a comet—one of the rare ones that breaks free.

From the back seat, Stella goes, “Daya. Tell your mom you’re coming home with me.”

“I can’t just tell her that,” I say, twisting around to look at her.

“Why not?”

“That’s more of an ask-my-mom situation.”

“Why? She’ll just say no.”

“We go through this every time, Stells. It’s a school night, for one—”

“It’s not like you’re asking her if you can smoke crack. You’re staying over at my house like you’ve done a bazillion times. I don’t get how that’s an ask-my-mom situation.”

“Because.” I turn back around. “She’s not your mom.”

“Fine,” she says. “Then ask her.”

Stella messages her mom to let her know I’m coming home with her, while I text Joanna to tell her Stella’s in crisis and ask if I can stay the night.

Five minutes later, she still hasn’t written back.

You can call her mom, if you want, I add.

Three dots pulse for a few seconds, followed by:

Stella’s always in crisis.

That’s not an answer. I pull up a Google search, find what I’m looking for, then type it back to Joanna.

Okay, but even the Bible tell us to calm each other’s burdens.

We’re just about to turn onto Cortés when she types:

If that’s what you feel called to, Daya.

Wow. That’s a whole new approach for her. She didn’t say yes, exactly, but I’m glad she didn’t say no either. So why don’t I trust it?

B’Rad lets us out with a wave. When we get inside, Stella’s hot mom is painting her toenails in front of the TV. She’s watching that movie everyone loves so much—One More Time Around the Sun or something. Stella refers to every movie in that genre as Heteros in Love.

“Hola, mi preciosa,” she says. “Did you eat? There’s some carne guisada in the fridge.”

“Pass,” Stella mumbles on her way to her room.

“Thanks anyway, Mrs. Howell,” I say.

“You can call me Ms. Avila,” she tells me with a dimpled smile.

Damn.

“I forgot again, didn’t I?”

“No worries. G’night, you two.”

“Good night, Ms. Avila.” I turn and follow Stella into her room.

She shoves the door closed with her foot.

“You look like you wish that door was someone’s face,” I say.

“Starting with your friend Be Weird. Why are you hanging around that asshole, anyway?” she asks as I pull out the trundle from under her bed.

I sit down on it, taking a temperature check on the mood as she grabs a T-shirt and pajama pants out of her dresser drawer and tosses them to me.

“He’s not evil,” I finally tell her. “He may actually be one of the good guys.”

“Good guys don’t steal a bitch’s girlfriend.”

“It was eighth grade,” I say.

“She was still the love of my life, Daya.” Stella looks at herself in the mirror over her dresser, fluffs up her hair. “And don’t come at me with any of that if you love someone, set them free bullshit either. I know how your mind works.”

I snort. “What am I thinking right now?”

She turns to me and smiles. “That filth has no business in the sanctuary of this room.”

Stella comes over, flops on the bed above where I’m stretched out on the trundle, drawing solar systems on my arms in fine-point Sharpie. She sticks her leg out, pushing it into the space between my hand and the pen I’m holding.

“Draw me and Valentina Orozco together,” she says. “I’m manifesting.”

I start on the fleshy part of her calf, sketching out the basic shape of Stella.

“So, why are you hiding from Joanna tonight?” she asks.

“Why were you sitting out on the street earlier?” I ask back.

Valentina starts taking shape next to her. She always wears a dress, so I wrap the skirt around Stella’s calf.

“We’re both following nature’s mandate to have complicated relationships with our mothers,” she finally says.

I go, “Man. That’s some deep-rooted Psych 101 shit.”

But I know how her mind works too. When she doesn’t feel like talking about something, she makes jokes instead. I sneak a look at her, but she’s somewhere else.

She pulls her leg up so she can look at the Sharpie tattoo I gave her.

“Damn, you’re good,” she says.

I watch her trace the lines of Valentina’s dress with her fingertip.

“You want to talk about it?” I ask.

“Not really. I just kind of want to sleep it off.” She flops back on the bed and pulls the covers over her head, and within minutes her breathing becomes slow and rhythmic.

There’s nothing slow or rhythmic going on inside my head right now—just endless camera-clicks from a day full of cringe. Beckett, sitting in my room this afternoon, worrying about saying something the wrong way in Spanish while I’m worried about doing the wrong thing around her. Yesterday’s fight with my mom that turned into today’s fight with my mom. Sending questions into the universe tonight, but not getting back any answers. People seem to think God is up there somewhere, but in my experience, He’s not. He’s not at Grace Redeemer, or The Great Wait, or wherever Joanna thinks I’ll find Him. Why is it so hard for some people to separate the idea of God from the idea of church? If you really drill down to it, religion and God are mutually exclusive.

This is the hamster wheel I can’t get off right now.

This is what keeps me awake until almost dawn.

Too much confusion, not enough resolution.

And no way of knowing where the universe will spin me next.