Round Stars and Dead Stones Ch. 1

Ari would have liked to go on believing he wasn't some kind of creep, but he'd been following her for around ten minutes by the time it even occurred to him that this was troubling behavior. It had felt so natural to do, was the thing. She was familiar to him.

He'd first noticed her as he rounded the corner onto Church Street at the end of his long walk up the hill from the hostel. It was just starting to rain and she caught his attention by stepping out from the scrum of other shoppers to spring open her umbrella. It was crystal clear with a bright red rim, and she twisted it in her hand to make the individual sides fuzz into a choppy red circle before she turned to walk down the very center of the bricked pedestrian street.

It had felt intentional, inviting, but he hadn't had the presence of mind to recognize that in the moment. He'd just let his body accept the invitation, operating at the same level as a hand swatted at the tickling of an unseen burdock seed that cries to the brain, 'Spider! Spider!'

He recognized her. He recognized her, and she was dead. Holding those two thoughts in the same head was what had him following her.

Whether it was better or worse that he followed her at a distance, he couldn't decide. Even if it would have been absolutely unacceptable to walk up and introduce himself, keeping ten feet back with his eyes pinned to the nape of her neck wasn't a lot better. She would continually pause at the canopies along the street to make muttered small talk with the clerks huddled in their little three-table fortresses of potted succulents or candles or any of a half dozen other categories of standard issue doodad available for tourists to buy. These pauses strained the illusion and the strain made his memory feel smeary and waterlogged.

Had Maya had a fuller face than this one?

But it had been a couple years, hadn't it? He couldn't expect everything to match old photos.

She wore her hair like Maya did in her high school graduation photos, cut just below her jaw line and bleached and colored from black to honey brown, and styled into loose wings. Her mother had been so angry that some of that anger had splashed off and onto Ari for 'allowing' her to do it.

But she'd taken the photos anyway. She'd even given Ari some. They were somewhere.

At one point he had lingered on this and other minute mismatches of memory so long that the moment itself started to lose its edges. He was grateful for the umbrella and the way it drew a circle around his head for his eyes to track as she moved through the crowds.

Eventually, though, she dipped down a staircase off the sidewalk and into a place called Flying Circus Books and triggered a rule he hadn't realized he'd set for himself: No following her into any buildings. Her absence left him standing in a state of chilly clarity, soaked through to his underwear by summer-warm rain.

He forced one anxiety to distract him from another and looked down at his watch: Three minutes to six, and he'd passed his gig a full block ago. It occurred to him that he'd been following her with his backpack and his guitar case strapped to his back the whole time. Not very inconspicuous.

The rainwater soaked into his canvas sneakers made a strangled squash sound as he kicked off back down the street, headed for the Starsong Cafe. It was his one true regular gig, and the threat of losing that motivated him to forget everything else until he reached the shop's starry stained glass door.

A more severe threat met him at the door. The flash of white in his periphery vision suckered itself to his face. He clapped both hands to his face instinctively and, once his hands told him what it was, started to scrub the threadbare kitchen towel around his head in what he hoped was evident appreciation.

"Some of us plan our entire days on the assumption that other people will show up on time, you know." Blake was within brother-swatting distance all of a sudden, leaning on the reclaimed wood frame of the little foyer that separated the main cafe from Vermont's snow and salt and mud-assaulted streets.

Ari peeked out from behind the towel - there wasn't much to it, so this was easy - and tried to gauge whether his brother was in a playful mood. "Working in a place like this, that's got to be a really frustrating way to live."

Blake's face moved like it was trying to condense itself into a single, knotted point in the center of his skull. Play was not officially on the table. "At least I work!"

"I work." Ari tossed the towel back to Blake, who gave it a disdainful look before tucking it into the string of his apron. "Where's Zoe?"

"You'd better have a change of clothes in that bindle of yours," Blake said. "Anyways, she's on her way."

Ari rolled his eyes and made his way through the interior door and around the corner to the 'family' bathroom. Blake's boss was allowed to be habitually late. To Blake, if you owned a place, you were never late. Always 'on your way.' He shrugged his guitar case off and set it aside, on the wicker changing table Zoe had set up in the larger of the cafe's two single occupancy bathrooms. The 'gasket' he'd made for the lid crinkled. It was mostly packing tape he'd affixed to the edges of the case's two halves with even more packing tape, but it kept the inside dry enough. His backpack he slung into the sink so he could rummage through it without getting the floor any wetter. It contained, in individual generic press and seal freezer bags of various sizes:

-His phone, a gift from Blake and supposedly of incalculable value.

-The same leatherette pocket journal he'd been trying to fill for about three years.

-His keys - to the hostel front door, to the hostel storage room, to his storage locker, and to the lock he used to protect a creaky fixed speed bike he'd bought at a thrift store when he first moved to the city.

-A pair of clean tube socks.

-Two pairs of dirty but passable tube socks.

-A pair of 'nice' floppy sandals.

It contained, in a single kitchen size garbage bag he'd tied shut:

-One baggy linen shirt with a banded collar.

-One pair of moisture-wicking boxer briefs.

-One pair of Thai fisherman pants in dark green.

No towel, though. He hadn't packed everything into bags because he expected it to rain, no, he did that because a drunk kid had whipped his bag into Champlain while he was busking by the waterfront once and the experience of performing triage on the contents had left an enduring paranoia.

He stripped down with his back pressed to the door, which hadn't reliably locked at any point that Ari could remember. Once he'd changed and quarantined his soaked clothes in the freshly-emptied garbage bag, he joined Blake at the corner booth where he was already digging into his meal of the two apple and cheddar turnovers and a double-stacked espresso lightened to soft beige by enough half and half to create some facsimile of an iced latte. The sight alone made Ari's stomach cramp, but Blake was insulated by not having received a double dose of milk-averse genetics. Sometimes he would tell Ari it was his consolation prize as a child of divorce.

"See?" Ari slid into the booth and let his guitar case lean on the wall with his backpack as a chock. "It's not like me not being early made you miss your break."

Blake scratched some flaky, cheesy crumbs out of the dense black beard he'd started cultivating over the winter - another genetic boon from their mother's first husband. "Only because nothing else went wrong. Did you eat before you left?"

"I eat, I work, it's fine," Ari said. "I'm eating dinner after my hour is up anyway."

"You give any thought to my offer?"

Ari sunk a little deeper in the squeaky booth Zoe had proudly reclaimed from a shuttering bar. He'd told Blake that he would 'think about,' the offer to move in, but he hadn't counted on the topic ever coming up again. Somehow. "Yeah, and I just don't think it's something that would work out in the long term."

"Well!" Blake put his hands up in an 'I can't believe you right now, wasting my kindness,' maneuver he had learned, not inherited, from the man they both called Dad. "What exactly is it about living in a hiker's hostel that's better for your long term plan?"

"I don't pay for housing or any food I absolutely need, I don't pay for utilities, so I can put almost everything I make into my savings." It was a rehearsed answer, true but only incidentally so, and saying it made Ari sit up straighter in his seat.

Blake swept his eyes back and forth from the top of Ari's waterlogged head to the Frankenstein's monster that was his guitar case, lingering long on each as if to give himself plenty of time to chew and swallow the last of his last pastry before asking, blandly, "What's a guy like you saving up for?"

"A down payment on a house to raise my family in one day," Ari said. This was not rehearsed. This was little brother pettiness. "Hey, aren't you only down half the occupancy of your apartment because Sadie moved out?"

Blake lowered his heavy caterpillar eyebrows, the corners of his mouth and, Ari could sense, his standards for what would constitute a polite response to that.

"I already have almost nine thousand dollars saved up." Ari folded is hands to hold his head and put on his best little stinker face.

"Horse piss!"

"Fighting again, boys?" Zoe had appeared, the jangle of her bangled wrists and ankles missed until the last possible moment. She plopped her saggy, oversized shoulder bag onto their table and produced from it the set of office keys Ari had been waiting for. "Why don't you make your escape and set yourself up, Ari? I need to go over some stuff with your brother anyway."

"You got it," Ari said, sweeping the keys into his palm and disappearing with them in a hurry. For all he knew or cared, Blake was about to get an earful about creating a poor environment for customers by bringing his family drama to work, and Ari was more than prepared to make it look like he'd had nothing to do with that. That meant zipping to Zoe's office, rescuing the tiny amp and mic stand from behind the paper goods boxes Zoe built up around them to protect her investment, and getting up on stage with plenty of time to put on the performance of testing his setup.

It was Zoe's belief that the evening crowds enjoyed that part, though Ari had never gotten that impression while he was fumbling to fit the magnetic pickup in place and find a spot for the mic where it picked up his voice but not the groaning efforts of the air conditioning vents. The 'stage,' which was raised only five inches from the floor and tucked into the shop's least convenient corner, was by only the slimmest margin any better than busking on Church Street.

By the time he had the amp cooperating, the mismatched chairs set around the copper-clad tables nearest the stage had cleared out, their patrons driven into the cafe's darker recesses by the looming promise of inescapable noise. The amp Zoe had bought was too beefy for the small space, but she'd made its use a condition of their arrangement anyway. Ari was done fighting about it, seeing as nobody ever actually left-left.

He walked to the backside of the stage and fiddled with the panel that could, in theory, tone down the overhead lights. It worked the first time, which was a pleasant change of pace. The ambience set as best as he could set it without help, he returned to the mic and started his usual spiel.

"Evening," it began, because Zoe didn't want him putting pressure on people to have a good anything. "If you're a regular, no introduction's necessary, but for the forgetful and the new folks: I'm Ariel Shay, I'm a guitarist and vocalist living here in Queen City, and I'm one of two acts you can see here at Starsong on Friday nights. First and third Fridays, as a matter of fact. I don't do CDs or anything, but if you think I'm good enough at what I do to show you a thing or two you can pick up info about lessons I offer from the community board in the entryway." He thumped the body of his guitar and the hollow drum sound came reached through the amp to wake up anyone who'd tuned out. "Well, that's enough about me, let's play some music. Feel free to sing along if you just can't help yourselves, but this isn't a tavern so try and keep it down."

Ari took a step back and breathed in to open up the center of his body and let the gears and gaskets in his machine drop and lock into place. As usual, in that moment, some uninvited voice that lived in the hole where his spinal column invaded his skull asked if he still knew how to do this.

"Gonna plant my sword in golden sand, down by the riverside."

Down By the Riverside was an easy one, and he could use that ease to convince himself that he'd always known how to do this. Nobody had anything against that song. Most everyone who came to Starsong hated the war, and anybody who didn't could get into the song through the Bible allusions even if Ari never sang about the Prince of Peace specifically.

He could skip and trip through the song like he was playing with it, because it was a bouncy song on a guitar. He could belt it if he felt like it, and that evening he did because belting chased the voice into a corner.

Best of all, it was a song that practically commanded listeners to sing along. It was a summer camp fire circle song for a reason, and in his performance it was useful the same way it was useful at camp: If people are singing with you, you're tricking them into liking everybody else in the circle a little more. You'll be kinder and quieter at lights-out, you'll think twice about the impulse to push or cut in line at the canteen. You'll tip more, or at all, and you'll take cards.

And when people are singing along with you, when you're directing them - I pause, you clap, we all shout 'Down by the riverside,' even if I just said to keep it down - you're in control and the space that voice can fill shrinks to a pinprick.

Ari couldn't reach this space with his own words anymore, so it was all covers all the time. At some point between dropping out of college and landing in Queen City, his mouth and throat had changed shape so that the words his brain cranked out no longer fit. They choked through and sat in his mouth in lumpy shapes that could only fall out into the world. Even his fingers had trouble carrying them out of his body and onto a page.

He hadn't touched that notebook with any serious thought in months at the least.

Once everyone willing to sing had had their chance, he had the room's attention and could sing whatever came to mind, which was mostly bouncy folk standards. With an acoustic guitar, it could be easy to get by with no ideas. The catalog of catchy material was deep and wide, and a lot of it didn't even come with licensing baggage. He could see why college guys with no personality filled the void with an acoustic guitar by sophomore year. He'd taught a few of them how to do that, and with luck others would take cards off the board before leaving that night.

Once he'd filled forty minutes and given his closing prattle thanking everyone for making it a good show and reminding them about the community board, Ari got right to breaking down the mic stand and returning the pickup to its box. He was afraid to touch the lighting panel again. What if it decided to electrocute him in exchange for giving him an entire performance with no flickering?

He caught sight of Zoe waving to him from behind the counter just as he was stooping to heft the amp and spirit it back to its hiding place. He used his spare hand to gesture curiously at himself, as if she could be waving at anyone else in the corner. She waved harder and showed her crowded teeth in a sunny grin that stretched to her ears. Then she gestured with two palms facing the floor, down, down, put everything down. So he did, and he came over to where Zoe had become a bouncing clown just barely restraining herself from tittering in delight. Her blonde hair seemed brighter, her green eyes dancing.

"Uh, what's up?" Ari ventured. "Did somebody leave a big tip?"

Zoe squinted her glittery eyes, which seemed to intensify their shine somehow. "It's even better," she said. She beckoned Ari behind the counter, and he obeyed. "Somebody bought you a drink."

"Oh. Cool." Since Ari's arrangement with Zoe ensured he got a free meal and a drink anyway, this didn't excite him. His eyes started to wander, seeking the takeaway cup Zoe had surely set aside for him to claim later. Then, when Zoe leaned into his field of vision with her giant grin turned to full brightness, something like dread bloomed in his brain and shed its cold petals down his back. "Wait."

"He's in that booth you were hiding in with Blake earlier," she said, touching his shoulders with a lightness that controlled without strength. It was the same lightness that his mother used to direct him, the strangling delicacy of someone with what they believe is your best interest in mind. "Go chat. Who knows? I'll have Blake clean up the stage."

Ari resisted, but not with his body. "Hang on, who even is this?"

Zoe shrugged under her shawl and herded him back out into the dining area proper. "He's got one of those names you don't hear too often, but I already forgot, sorry. He says he knows you from school."

That narrowed the list of possibilities to the single digits, considering Ari had dropped out in freshman year. "I don't think-"

"Just go on," Zoe said. She touch-pushed him through the crowds of guests scrambling in to get their coffee before closing time and gestured to the corner booth that got the least light. "Go on."

She'd extracted herself from the situation by the time Ari allowed himself to realize and accept that he'd never seen the man in the booth in his life.

The stranger, on the other hand, wasn't living in that reality. He raised a hand in greeting.

"Ariel!"