Page 16 of Starlight & Dark Nights

Jo nearly drops the spatula. "You want to read my stories?"

Bill aims for nonchalance as he lifts one shoulder. "Yeah. Is that so strange?"

Jo knows him well enough to realize that there's something to this request. Bill has been busy and only marginally interested in her writing. The fact that he wants to read her stories now is setting off an alarm bell in her mind.

"No," Jo says to him, trying to look unconcerned. “It’s not strange.” She holds herself steady and keeps her gaze on her husband’s face. “I’ll get you the magazines and you can read them at your leisure.”

Bill gives a single nod, as if this decides everything. “Okay then,” he says. “I think I’ll go and get washed up for dinner.”

Jo stands there in the kitchen. She has no idea what prompted this, but she’s sure that Bill will have some sort of response to the things she’s written. She just doesn’t know what that response will be.

CHAPTER7

Jude

January days aren’tlong like summer days—after all, the girls go to kindergarten and Jude gets at least a bit of time to herself—but they can feel restless in a different way.

January is full of all kinds of reminders for Jude: her mother’s birthday is right there in the middle of the month, and January was the first full month she’d spent living under her father’s roof. Every year over Christmas, Jude begins to dread the new year, to remember the way it had felt to ring in 1942 in a place where it felt like the sun never stopped shining. She remembers trying to get used to living with her stepmother and her half siblings, and the distinct feeling of showing up at a new school and not only being the new girl, but being a girl who could barely speak. It took her weeks before she could comfortably utter a word without fearing that if she opened her mouth, Japanese words might come spilling forth.

She’s fixing dinner now, waiting to go and pick up the girls at Frankie’s dance studio on the main street of Stardust Beach before racing back to pull everything out of the warm oven and place it on the table just as Vance arrives home, but the silence of the house beckons for her to stop what she’s doing and think. Remember. Wonder at the twists and turns, the hills and valleys of life.

Almost on autopilot, Jude fills a glass with cubes of ice, pours in a splash of vodka, fills it up to three-quarters with orange juice, and then tops it off with a bit more vodka for good measure. She sits at the kitchen table and crosses her legs, gazing out at the way the sun is dipping lower in the sky. The swimming pool is placid and the patio furniture is tucked away, just as Vance prefers it to be when no one is out there.

For years, Jude had given herself a hard time over this need for an afternoon drink, but she’s gradually come to think of it as the counterpart to her morning coffee: one will wake you up and get you going, and the other will slow things down and help you ease through the rest of your day.

But had she always felt this way? She sips her Screwdriver now thoughtfully, listening to the kitchen radio as the Beatles come on singing “I Feel Fine.” She taps her foot along to the music, letting the toe of her shoe hit the linoleum as she hums to the tune.

It was all so long ago, those first drinks—those first forays into nothingness. Jude had been young (so young!) when she’d met Alice, and at the time, it had felt impossible to think that things had been any other way. Alice was a hurricane, a firestorm, a force of nature. All green eyes, red hair, and guts. Nothing but sass and certainty. And for a time, Alice had been Jude’s mentor.

It had started one day during her junior year of high school, and it had ended with Jude being brought home by the cops. Oh, had her father been mad! And Bea…wow, she’d never seen her stepmother show so much emotion in her presence, and it had been so extreme that Jude remembers now how the urge to laugh had been almost impossible to ignore. But she’d been drunk that night, and so the laughter had bubbled forth against her will, enraging her stepmother even more.

But Alice…Jude thinks about her as she drains her first drink and then goes to pour another. The way Principal McCarthy had marched Alice into Jude's Algebra class that afternoon, pointing to the empty seat next to Jude’s and ordering Alice to “Sit. Be quiet. Listen. Learn.”

Jude can see the whole scene play out in her mind as she sits in her chair again, swirling the fresh drink around with a light flick of her wrist. She takes another long drink, crunching an ice cube between her teeth.

“What are we doing in here?” Alice had asked, leaning towards Jude. The top buttons of her white blouse were opened, and as she leaned, Jude saw several inches of creamy cleavage; no other girl in their school would have dared to wear the top of their blouse open this way. “Should I just give up now, or can you tutor me?” Alice winked at Jude, a grin spreading across her pretty face.

Jude wanted to respond, and she was intrigued by the thought of tutoring the wildest girl in their school. She let her eyes graze over the untamed main of red hair that tumbled over Alice's shoulders. Everyone knew that Alice Kamp was the girl who never said no. If a boy asked her out, there was no end of the line; the horizon of possibility stretched on endlessly, which obviously meant that Alice was never short on dates or invitations.

By the time the bell rang, Jude had decided that she’d offer to tutor Alice. Even though most of the girls hated her, it was clear that they also revered her. Alice was spoken of in a way that indicated a plain fear of her power and her knowledge of the world. And that was it, really—wasn’t it? Alice knew things that the other girls didn’t. She had a way of moving through the world that oozed confidence and world-weariness and amusement all at once, while the rest of them were just awkward, inexperienced teenage girls.

Alice was standing there, packing her books into her bag as Jude put away her pencil and her notes. “I can tutor you,” Jude offered. “Can you come to the library after school today?”

Alice turned towards her, surprise all over her face. “Today?” She lifted an eyebrow. “Don’t you know better than to ask a girl for a date without some notice?”

Jude felt her face go red. She wasn’t sure what to say.

“Sorry,” Jude muttered, shoving her things into her bag and trying to get out of the classroom.

“I’m kidding,” Alice said, glancing at the clock high up on the wall. “I can meet you right after school. But I’ve got a date at five o’clock, so I can only stay for a while.”

Suddenly it felt like the sky was opening up and the sun was breaking through the clouds. “Okay,” Jude said, smiling. “I’ll meet you at the table under the window. Bring your math book.”

Their friendship had spun quickly and inexplicably into a closeness that Jude hadn’t anticipated. For as busy as Alice was with boys and after-school detention, the one thing she’d been missing was female friendship. From that first day in the library, she’d taken Jude under her wing and taught her everything she knew…about everything. At first, Jude’s eyes had opened wide as she described the kinds of things she did with boys in the backseat of their cars, and then she’d had to intentionally close her mouth as Alice explained the various ways a young girl could earn detention from the principal. (For the record, those ways included: smoking cigarettes out the window of the girls’ bathroom; hiding out in a bathroom stall in the boys’ room with the captain of the basketball team; skipping classes and making out with the vice principal’s son underneath the bleachers in the sports field; writing her own phone number on the wall outside the boys’ locker room and indicating in permanent ink that anyone calling this number would be ensured a good time; and swearing in Home Economics class before refusing to bake a cake because Alice had no intention of ever becoming “a big, fat housewife.”)

They’d been friends for about a month when Alice introduced Jude to what she called her “magic elixir,” a concoction that Jude quickly realized was some sort of horrible combination of all the alcohols that Alice could sneak from her father’s liquor cabinet. She carried a small, silver flask in her purse, offering Jude sips of it whenever they met in the girls’ bathroom between classes.

Jude can still remember her first drink of the stuff: she’d been washing her hands at the sink, using that horrible pink powder that came out of the soap dispenser and barely made a lather when you rubbed it under water, when Alice stepped out of the stall, still zipping up her skirt.

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