I watched her toss out some papers and a box of paperclips as she dug to find the book. “Aha, here it is!” She moved from the desk chair to beside me on the bed. “Okay, now let’s just look at last year’s sophomore class to see if we can find him. Carter, Carter, Carter, last name Carter.” She scanned through the “C” names.
“I’m telling you he’s not in our class. We would recognize the last name.”
She waved her hand at me. “Yeah, yeah, shush. Nothing there. Let’s check the juniors. Okay, Carter, Carter, Car-” her voice broke off. “Is this him?”
She pointed to a photo of a guy with dark, wavy hair. His eyes seemed to pierce through me. “I… I think so.” I felt like someone had punched me in the gut. Even though I only saw him briefly, and it was from the side, I knew in my heart that was him.
“Wow, for real?” Zoe sounded impressed with herself. “His name is Brandon, and so he’d be a senior this year. Wow. That’s crazy. We found him. Now you can, you know.” She cocked her head to the side.
“I can what?”
“Marissa!” She rolled her eyes. “You can give him the letter.”
The letter. Its envelope crinkled as I pressed it against my chest. I thought about what Zoe had said earlier. ‘Hi, here’s your letter for Heaven! Don’t ask how I got it.’ How could I just track down this Brandon guy at school, pull out the letter his little brother wrote to his deceased brother, and have it be casual?
This situation was going to require careful planning. Because of that, I asked Zoe if she wouldn’t mind taking a drive to the store to get us some sodas. There was no need for her to know that there was already a full six-pack of soda in the fridge. I just needed a few minutes alone. I lay back on my pillow and stared at the plastic stars on my ceiling. They were so old that they barely glowed in the dark anymore. I was nine years old when my mom first put them up, and at that time I had big dreams of being an astronomer. That was before I knew everything that went into it. Math and I didn’t get along. All I wanted was a job where I could sit and stare at the stars and wonder who or what inhabited them.
When I was young, my mom would tell me the story of the night fellows — a group of beings that lived on the brightest star in the universe. Their purpose was to light all the other stars from their power plant. They were only a group of three, but they were all-powerful because they were filled with light and love. There was no star they couldn’t light up because of the power of their love. She would say that’s how the three of us were, Mom, Marc, and I. We had enough love between the three of us to light up the entire night sky. And I believed her. I believed we could get through anything together. As long as we stuck together, we could solve any problem and conquer any obstacle. Years later I tried to believe that when she got cancer. Even when Marc took off, I still tried to believe. But now it was just me and Gram. The all-powerful vessel of love we had together had now sunk.
****
Later at dinner, I wiped some sauce from the corner of my mouth. The pepperoni pizza tasted amazing. Even Gram seemed to enjoy it. I had an English paper to write, and Zoe had to get home to watch Zack while her mom went to work at her second job.
“So what do you think you’re gonna do?” she asked me as we walked outside to her car.
I shrugged. “I don’t know”
“I’ll do some more brainstorming, and we’ll come up with something tomorrow at school. Okay?” She gave me a quick hug and popped into her car.
She beeped her horn as I waved goodbye. Even though the sky wasn’t pitch-black yet, I could make out the North Star. I wrapped my arms around myself and wondered if my mom was there now, helping light up the night sky with her love.
Chapter Four
I packed my backpack for school. Lunch. Homework. Water bottle. The letter, which I had put inside a plastic baggie, making it look like a piece of evidence or something. But I wanted to make sure that if anything spilled in my backpack, the letter would be safe. How I was going to get it to Brandon, I still wasn’t sure. Somehow, I was hoping Zoe was going to help with that.
“You’re not going to believe this,” Zoe said.
I slammed my locker shut (it never closes if you shut it gently) and saw her big brown eyes gleaming at me.
“What?” I asked. We walked down the hall toward our English class.
“Darren knows him. Brandon, I mean.”
Her words somehow threw off my equilibrium, and I bumped into a group of skater dudes.
“Sorry,” I mumbled to them. Once the skaters stopped giving me the evil eye, I said to Zoe, “He knows him?”
“Yeah, I was talking to him about—” She stopped to grab a lip gloss from her purse. “Oh don’t worry, though. I didn’t like say anything about you or the letter. I just brought up the accident, and mentioned Brandon’s name, and asked if he had ever heard of him.” She puckered and applied some cherry-scented gloss to her lips. “Trust me, when Darren said he knew him, my mouth, like, hit the floor. So I guess he’s pretty quiet and sits in the back of class most of the time. They have two classes together — wait, maybe he said three. So I can totally tell you where he’s
