Pink Flamingos

Stargazing

I had come to associate knocks on my window – loudly and abruptly in the day, softly and cautiously at night – as a sign of Eddie wanting to see me. I ignored them half the time. I figured that if he wasn’t dying, crying or bringing me food, it probably wasn’t worth it. But sometimes I couldn’t help myself. Sometimes I even found myself looking forward to seeing him too.

The heat hit me as soon as I opened the door. It was only ever so slightly cooler inside. My mothers had invested in several electric fans in an attempt to save us from the summer. Eddie was standing under the window expectantly, running his hands through his hair. “Well, what is it?” I asked.

He shrugged. I could see the usual amused twinkle in his eyes. “I’m bored.”

I raised my eyebrows. “That’s it?” I said. “You’re bored? There’s really no good reason? I was really busy, you know.”

That made him laugh. “Sweetheart-“

“Nancy.”

“Nancy, your curtains are pretty see-through. You were just lying on your bed staring at the ceiling. It really doesn’t seem like I’m interrupting much.”

“…do you usually…do you usually watch me through the curtains?” I fixed my gaze on the ground, feeling more embarrassed by the second. I was suddenly conscious of how often I got changed in my room, and even worse than that, how often I spoke to myself, or practiced impressions in the mirror. Being nude wasn’t so bad, but being truly naked was a fate worse than death in my opinion.

“Only before I knock,” he said, “just to make sure it’s not a really bad time.” I began to reply before he cut me off – “And yes, I know that most of the time you just pretend you didn’t hear me, or that you’re busy. It’s fine.”

“Why don’t you do anything about it then?” I asked curiously.

He shrugged again. “I guess I just don’t want to annoy you too much.”

His answer surprised me. There was silence. “My parents aren’t home,” I said, moments before I realized how I awful that sounded. i***t, I thought to myself. i***t, i***t, i***t, i***t-

“Yeah, I saw them leave. Can I come in? I just wanna hang out. And it’s too hot outside.”

With a sigh, I stepped aside. He brushed past me with a grin and headed inside. Softly, I shut the door behind us, feeling as though the world had suddenly become a lot smaller and started spinning a lot faster.

“I’ve never been inside your place before,” he remarked.

“Well yeah, that’s because I’ve never let you in before.”

I watched as Eddie walked around, slowly but surely making his way to my room, seemingly drinking in every detail of our house. He opened the door for me with a flourish, as though he was inviting me into his room instead, and guided me in with his hand on the small of my back. My heart raced.

He let out a slow whistle as he shut the door behind us. He commented, “You’ve got a lot of books.”

“I guess.” I darted in front of him and moved a pile out of the way, shoving it haphazardly on the overcrowded shelf. “I just love to read. Is there something wrong with that?”

“So do I.”

I could never tell if he was being honest, or simply mocking me. Was his tone always sarcastic, or was I always just insecure? I did what I do best – I said nothing.

Seemingly not noticing my silence, or perhaps simply not realizing the significance, he continued. “I reread a lot of the books I read when I was a kid. It’s nice, ya know – to relive your childhood again.”

I made a contemplative noise, hoping that if he thought he was being acknowledged, he would leave it alone. Truth be told, I didn’t want to talk about his childhood, or my own, or anyone else’s for that matter – he fascinated me, but the whole idea made me sad. And besides, I didn’t want to know where he came from; it would ruin the illusion I had created for him, the role of the daydream boy from across the street that he had been unknowingly cast in.

It wasn’t that I wanted anything to come of it. Sure, sometimes I thought about how nice it would be to see him every day, and sometimes I had even begun to fantasize about how nice it would be to kiss him every day. But everything – both the hopeless imaginings and the fact that they would never become a reality – was all my fault.

Luckily enough, he dropped the subject. He continued to observe silently, examining every inch of the identity that I had curated with my possessions.

In all honesty, I was close to being a hoarder. During the move to Nevada, I gave nothing away. Everything was cluttered and crowded, it was an organized mess that only I truly knew how to navigate.

There were stacks of books everywhere, arranged alphabetically but for the most part, without a shelf to call home. The sunlight that streamed through the window beside my bed glinted off the book covers, giving the literature I treasured more than anything an angelic feel. My literature was a second home to me; I had a million second homes.

In a stack on my small desk were my journals, entirely filled with my manic thoughts, my hopes and wishes, my fears and romances, my poems and stories, with the exception of the one lying on top – that was only half full and was waiting to be completed like the others. Eddie scrutinized the cover for a moment – it was dark purple and covered in astronomical signs, courtesy of Mama Chelsea – before moving on.

There were other, more senseless things, shoved into my bedroom – a larger than life Elvis Presley poster stuck to the wall, covered in red lipstick marks from girls I had known in my hometown. Scented candles everywhere, each with a different spiritual meaning. Photographs of Priscilla Presley, Marilyn Monroe and Billie Holiday sitting proudly on the dresser – women I was ever inspired by that I wanted to embody.

There were relics from my childhood everywhere – little fairy statuettes glinted and gleamed on different shelves and old trophies from back when I cared about achievements littered the room. A pack of tarot cards was placed delicately on the bedside table, the three that Mama Chelsea had drawn for me lying on top. A picture of my father hung above my unmade bed like a painting of Jesus Christ.

When he was finished investigating the artefacts that determined who I was, he flopped down on my bed with a sigh. “You’ve got a cool room, sweetheart. You’ve got more stuff than anyone else I know. Except for the ceiling. The ceiling’s real plain.”

I felt myself taken aback by the tidal wave of thoughts that crashed against the walls of my skull. My whole body seemed to float, somehow exempt from the effects of time and space and yet a complete victim to them simultaneously. He was laying in my bed but I was the one left feeling like a stranger – a visitor, a guest, an alien, a foreigner, an explorer, a dream-

“You wanna put something on the ceiling?” He asked abruptly, his eyes fixed upward while mine couldn’t be drawn away from him. Like me, he was his own dichotomy; there was something rough and gentle about him at the same time that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. One moment he was nothing, the next he was something – one moment he was nothing to me, the next I felt like an insignificant comet stuck in his orbit.

“What did you have in mind?” My voice sounded far away. Even a simple answer seemed cautious. I kicked myself for being so scared, praying that he didn’t pick up on it.

He sat up with a wide, playful smile. “I’ll be right back.”

I watched as he retreated, practically sprinting out of my room. Testing the translucence of the lace curtains, I peeked through them to see him run quickly into his own trailer. The hinges of the open door creaked in the quiet street.

Eddie reappeared from his own trailer with what looked like a sheet of paper tucked under his arm. Slamming the door behind him, he dashed back over to my place. When he re-entered my room, I tried to look as though I wasn’t interested in the slightest, and that I certainly hadn’t been watching him through the curtains.

I didn’t know how believable it was. If he saw me, he didn’t remark. He only held up his treasure, three sheets of paper that he had been so eager to go and fetch. It was covered in little plastic stars.

“I’ve had this forever,” he said, “but I’ve got nothing to do with them. Do you want them?”

“…sure?”

He grinned and passed one of the sheets to me. Excitedly, he began to explain that the side attached to the paper was sticky, and that I just needed to hold them to the roof for a few seconds and then they’d stay up there for ages. “They also glow in the dark,” he finished with a childlike enthusiasm. I tried to truly take in what he was saying, but the whole situation felt a little surreal to me.

“Are you going to put some up too?” I said with a shy smile.

“You want me to?”

Trying to take steady breaths, I nodded quickly. I hoped it wasn’t obvious how nervous I was. He chuckled at me and peeled one of the stars off the paper.

I looked on as he slid his shoes off and climbed on my bed, sinking into the mattress and wobbling from side to side ever so slightly. He extended his finger up to the ceiling carefully, as though he was preparing himself to touch the sky, and stuck the star right in the center. The world was still.

After putting the star in its rightful place, he drew the blinds next to my bed shut. Then, he climbed down, finding his place on the floor once more with a soft thud. He turned off the bedside table lamp, seemingly lost in his own world. He drifted past me and closed the lace curtains, not that it made the room much darker.

There, in the middle of the ceiling above my bed, was the first star shining brightly in the partial darkness. I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t thought of doing anything like that before. The other stars on the sheets of paper we were holding had begun to glow too, as though they couldn’t wait to find their place as well.

“Thank you,” I whispered. But I didn’t want to speak softly. I wanted to sound like I meant every word, because I wanted to be honest – it needed to be reiterated and reinforced. “Thank you,” I said again, louder, hoping that it sounded genuine above all.

He turned around to face me with a different aura surrounding him. There was no cheeky grin, no twinkle of amusement, no mocking stare. There was something more profound about his gaze and his expression that I couldn’t quite place. But whatever it was, I knew that I appreciated it.

It was the simplest act – putting glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling, the kind that every little kid owned at some point. It shouldn’t have meant that much to either of us. And yet, it did. I felt myself growing fonder of him by the minute – of all the hidden sides he had, of the way he flew proudly back and forth between different facets of his identity. He was a fascination. It was odd to be interested in him for the same reasons that a certain kind of people found themselves interested in me from time to time.

Holding my sheet of stars in two shaking hands, I walked over to the beginning of our night sky for my own turn. Eddie appeared behind me, holding my hips and lifting me onto the bed, steadying me as I the bottom of my feet disappeared into the downy mattress. He climbed on after me and we both sank even further down while giggling.

I copied constellations I had committed to heart over the years from the books, he created pictures and shapes, swirls and spirals that engulfed and surrounded my own galaxies. I couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity of the situation. It all glowed so brightly in the darkened room – the stars, and me and him.

It all felt like a dream. Butterflies were flapping about excitedly in my stomach and I couldn’t stop smiling. He looked just as serene as I did.

“I’ve always wanted to go stargazing,” I sighed happily.

“Well, now’s your chance, sweetheart.” He said. “If you wanna do it, why haven’t you done it before?”

“Back home, I could never really see the stars – there was too much light, even at night. It was a big city. And here I always go to bed early anyway, unless I’m reading. So this is as good as it’s gonna get for me.”

He flopped down on my bed, moving over so that there enough room for me. Cautiously, I laid beside him, realizing quickly that it wasn’t possible to put much space between us, unless I wanted to fall onto the floor. While I tried to focus on simply breathing steadily, my mind drifted to other places.

I felt every movement, every shift of his body beside me. Warmth radiated from him as he wrapped his arm around my shoulders, bringing me a little closer. In the silence, I could hear his breathing, and I felt the constant rise and fall of his chest. Everything about him seemed calm and peaceful.

“We should go stargazing sometime,” he said. “Proper stargazing, ya know. That could be fun.”

“Can you see the stars out here? The only star I can see is Vegas.”

“Not all the time. But sometimes, every so often, they shine brighter than anything. Same with the moon. I’ll show you sometime.”

I hummed softly, thoughtfully. I knew that a million things were happening outside my bedroom door – people were mowing their lawns and waiting to finish up at work for the day. People were suffering and people were laughing. But in that moment, we may as well have been the only people in Nevada – the only people in the world, even. Nothing else existed to me and I desperately wondered if he felt the same way.

“Hey Eddie?” I asked softly, trying to muster as much courage as I could. I knew that I had to find out if he thought the same way as me – if he was having the same doubts about his future, or about having any future at all.

He turned his head to look me in the eye. “Yeah Nancy?”

“Do you think you’ll get married one day? Will you settle down and have kids? Do you… do you want that? Do you want to be that way?”

I didn’t know where the words were coming from. All I knew was that they needed to be said. I wanted to know.

It was silent, and every moment that passed made me even more nervous. My skin crawled under the weight of what I had said. I prayed that he didn’t think I was strange all of a sudden.

“I don’t know if I want to, but I know that I will,” he said. “Everyone does eventually. So, if I meet the right girl, sure – I’ll settle down. We’ll get a house in the middle of suburbia and have a few kids.”

“But you said you don’t want that.”

“We’re sixteen, sweetheart. Of course I don’t know if I want that yet. But I will one day. You’ll get married too one day, and you’ll get pregnant I guess – have some jerk’s kids.”

“What if I don’t want that?” I whispered quietly, my heart beating faster.

The idea of it terrified me but the only thing that scared me more was the idea of being without. It seemed that no matter what happened, I would never be satisfied – I would always be longing for something more, dreaming of what could have been.

“Why don’t you want that?”

Really, I had thought about my answer for years before that moment. “Because I don’t think I’ll ever be happy.”

He sighed and intertwined his finger with mine. “You’ll be happy,” he said. “It’ll all work out for you.”

“And for you as well,” I replied.

He stayed silent. My courage failed me and I couldn’t think of a single other thing to say, despite my thoughts swirling around my mind like a whirlpool. Every word I could possible say seemed unnecessary – the silence that weaseled its way in between us seemed to say so much more. He thought about everything and I thought about everything and we didn’t say one word of it to one another.

As I laid there beside him, I tried to simply appreciate the moment. What did it mean to be at peace? What did it mean to be loved? Would I ever truly experience either? I heard him humming an Elvis song quietly under his breath – if I wasn’t mistaken, it was ‘Are You Lonesome Tonight’. I had never heard him play it on his record player before.

What we had done together that day was a part of love, I was sure of that at least. Every moment was euphoric and underneath the manmade, plastic stars, we had captured the essence of a dream. I shut my eyes and tried to preserve the feeling in my heart, so that I could draw on it later.