Starfire(5)
Who was he?
I closed my eyes and imagined his face. David? No, he was a Dalton. No offense to the Davids of the world, but Davids manage grocery stores and fix furnaces. They don’t play brooding vampires and sweep small-town bookstore managers up in a tornado of fame and emotional dysfunction.
Touching his school photo on the screen, I felt the emptiness of missing him. He was still in LA, probably hiding from the prying paparazzi in that big house of his, and here I was in Beaverdale, hungover and getting fingerprints of sadness all over my laptop screen.
Shayla popped into my room, one towel around her body and another one around her showered hair. She jumped on the bed next to me.
“Whatcha shopping for?”
I tried to shut the laptop, but she was fast.
“You caught me,” I said with a sigh. “But we can’t talk about it, because I swore I wouldn’t bore everyone with the LA stuff.”
She glowered at the screen and chided me, “I hope you didn’t find the you-know-what, because he was under eighteen, and that makes it child-you-know-what and very illegal.”
“Gross! I wasn’t looking for the actual film.”
“That’s too bad, because here it is.”
I screamed. “Delete it! Gross, gross, gross. Get it off my computer!”
“Calm down. They don’t have the video, just stills. Like those blurry screen-caps. Hmm.” She chuckled. “Chandler Boink.”
“That’s not funny.”
“Hmm.” She kept clicking, riveted to the screen.
“Shay, how do you feel about Dalton right now? Like if we didn’t know him, and you were just a regular girl again, watching the show with your friends? Do you think his career is fucked because of this?”
“He plays a moody vampire, Peaches. He’s not Meryl Streep.”
“So, you don’t think it matters?”
“Oh, it matters. I don’t care how fast you run, you never outrun something like Chandler Boink, starring in Pizza Delivery Sluts Love Anal.”
I fell back on the bed and grabbed a pillow to cover my face as I screamed.
Shayla said, “I know, right? Why did it have to be anal? I mean… it’s porn, so there’s always anal, but why did it have to be in the title? Poor Dalton.”
From under the pillow, I asked, “How many girls did he screw?”
Shayla patted my foot. “Just one, baby. Just one in this movie, and I’m sure that’s it. You were definitely the second girl he slept with, ever.”
I yanked the pillow off my face and blinked at her in disbelief. “Really?”
Shayla smirked and shook her head. “No, not really. For a girl genius you sure are dumb sometimes.” She laughed. “Really, Peaches, he’s probably slept with more girls than a year has days. You’re better off without him.”
I hugged my arms around my body. “What about him, though? Is he better off without me?”
Shayla raised her eyebrows and gave me a serious stare.
“He’s coming to Beaverdale,” I said. “There’s no Keith here to protect me from Dalton’s charms.”
“His charms?”
“And his penis.”
“And his bumpy chest.”
“But mostly his charms,” I said, stifling a giggle.
“Right. Because it was his charms you were blowing when you guys trespassed onto the Weston Estate.”
This time, my giggle would not be stifled. Dalton had taken me to the hot spring of local legend, and I’d played mermaid for him. Just thinking about how good it felt to be naked outdoors with him, touching each other in the dappled sunlight… it put a smile on my face. Even running naked through the woods with some shotgun-wielding maniac on our heels was making me grin, now that some time had passed.
Shayla asked, “What would Keith say if he found out you went back to Dalton?”
“I don’t know what he’d say, but I can picture the hurt look on his face.”
“Would he consider it cheating? Are you guys dating long distance?”
“No, Shay. I told you. We never were dating. We were just doing a mutual rebound thing, to unbreak our hearts.”
She made a popping sound with her mouth.
“You’re right,” I said. “Unbreak our hearts sounds ridiculous out loud.”
“Maybe Keith is the guy for you. I’ve never heard one bad thing about him.”
“He puts parsley in smoothies, and he made me go to the gym.”
She shook her head. “In that case, you ought to press charges for cruel and unusual treatment.”
I glanced over at the heart-shaped mylar balloon tethered to my night stand. It had been a gift from my family, but looking at it made me think of Keith, and how he’d phoned me the night I returned home from LA, exactly when I’d needed him. That was just so like Keith, to do the sweet, sensitive thing to show he was thinking about you.