How Moon Fuentez Fell in Love with the Universe Read online

  Star gives another bloodcurdling scream, which I attempt to shout over. “But summer is now!” We’ve been out of school—graduated, even!—for two weeks already.

  “Yup. He apologized for the short notice, but apparently the Sapphire brothers dropped out for a family emergency. You and Belle Brix—we met her once, right, in Seattle?—anyway, you two will take their places.”

  Star visibly shudders at the name “Belle Brix.” “Ugh,” Star says at the same time I say, “That sucks.”

  Mom gives me a warning glare. I forgot that “sucks” upsets Jesus too.

  “What’s wrong with Belle Brix?” I ask, diverting attention away from my vulgarity. That girl single-handedly taught my whole generation—me included—how to perfect the glitter cat-eye.

  “It’s… drama.” Star waves her hand. “When do I leave?”

  Right. Damn. All summer without Star. What the heck am I going to do?

  And then something really close to happiness settles in my chest. I know exactly what I’ll—

  “You and your sister leave this weekend.”

  For the first time in ages—years, maybe—Star and I are silent. She stares at me as though I cut all her paper-white hair off with a pair of garden shears. And I stare at her like—like I don’t know what. Because I don’t know what the hell is going on.

  “Oh, don’t give me that look,” Mom says, grabbing another slice of pizza. “I told Andro that because you’re so young—Star, you’re the youngest Fotogram star to join the tour ever—you’d need your sister. What kind of a mother lets her seventeen-year-old daughter tour the country alone? Huh?”

  I promptly remove that lid off my mouth. “But, Mom—”

  “No buts, Moon.” Mom gives a glare that says, I will throw six steak knives at your face if you don’t stop. So I stop. Because I know my mom has really good steak-knife-throwing aim. “Besides, who’s going to photograph her on the road?”

  My head has dropped so far, I’m practically inhaling pizza grease. “So you’re telling me I’m going to spend all summer locked in a tour bus so that I can take pictures of Star?”

  Star tilts her head. “As opposed to spending all summer locked in our home to take pictures of me?”

  “Hey, I get out—”

  “The woods don’t count, Moon!”

  “Girls!” Mom’s voice slices like a machete. I bet she’s good at throwing those, too. “You’re both going. And no, Moon, you will have more to do than take photos. Andro said he’s hiring you to sell merch.”

  “Merch,” I say. God. “Did Andro really say ‘merch’ or—”

  “He’s paying you four thousand dollars.”

  I stop breathing when I realize Mom’s talking to me and not Star. “For selling merch?” My voice is all squeaky.

  “Yes.”

  Jesus. What kind of merchandise am I going to be selling? Crack? Live velociraptors?

  “Come on, Moon,” Star says. “You’ll get to see your soul mate in the flesh.”

  I scoff. “You know I don’t care about that.” Even though the thought of breathing the same air as Andro Philips is giving me heat rash.

  Mom leans back. “I’ll let you tell me your decision, Moon. You know I don’t make those for you girls.” I swallow my snort. “But if Moon doesn’t go, neither of you go.”

  Star gives me a look so devastating, I immediately groan. “Fine.”

  Mom always says she doesn’t make our decisions, but she also fails to mention that she doesn’t give us a choice, either. Or me at least.

  Another shriek that makes my eardrums want to crawl and hitch a ride to Alaska. I glare at Star and Mom as they hug and dance. I literally cannot remember the last time Mom laid a hand on my shoulder. I’m not sure she’s ever hugged me, not even before I learned to talk, when she had zero proof I’d be the bad daughter.

  Whatever. I have better things to do.

  In my room, I pull up the Fotogram app on my phone. My username is Moonflower, Tía’s nickname for me. It’s kind of obvious if anyone were going to search for me on there. But no one will, so, moot point.

  Andro Philips’s FG page is full of healthy meals made of pureed carrots, grilled chicken breasts, and wilted kale. There’s the occasional party picture with shimmering celebrities, everyone smiling and looking as though they’ve just participated in a giant orgy with sparkly fairies and vampires. My favorites are the ones of him surfing, skimming the water like it’s made of fabric. Oh, no, actually, I really like the workout ones too. “Damn,” I say as he lifts what looks to be a three-thousand-pound dumbbell in a loop. His bicep looks like it’s trying to eat his whole body.

  I can’t believe I’m going to be licking distance from those biceps in less than a week. As the merch girl, I have to remind myself forcefully. As Star Fuentez’s invisible sister.

  A notification pops up in my messages. It’s from Deborah Opal. No idea if that’s her real name. Hey, OMG, Moonflower lady, where are you? I’m dying for an update! I smile. Opal was one of my first followers when I decided to use FG for more than stalking Andro Philips. And I think an update is something I really need right about now too.

  I gather my mystical little suitcase and my camera bag. After pulling a lavender-print hoodie over my head—my favorite, the illustration looks like it’s from an ancient book of herbs—I head down the hall. I can hear Mom and Star yapping in Star’s room, so I give the door a knock.

  “Come in,” Star calls.

  They’re both standing over a massive mountain of clothing that reminds me of one of Maurice Sendak’s Wild Things. I recognize the million-dollar cloak hanging out the side of it like a tail.

  “Packing already?” I ask, surveying the pile of luggage on Star’s bed.

  Star waves around a bunch of papers. “There are sixteen whole events. Each with a different theme.” As though that explains a need to transform everything you wear into a colossal clothes creature. But I shrug. I guess I’d be more surprised if Star didn’t start packing before she was even finished with dinner.

  “What’s in your hand?” I ask Mom, who’s got the papers now.

  “The schedule.” I make for it, but Mom pulls it away. “We need this, Luna.” She gets like this when she’s all stressed out, calling me and Star by the proper Spanish names she and Dad should’ve given us.

  “I want to see it when you’re done, okay?”

  “I’ll forward you the email,” Star says, picking up a brown jumpsuit covered in gold embroidery. It’s one of my favorites.

  “Yes,” I say before she even asks. “You need to bring that. You know you look like a goddess in it.”

  Star beams at me. “You should’ve gotten one too, you know.”

  “Yeah…” Yeah right, I mean. With my hips, I’d look about seven months pregnant with great white shark triplets. But Star’s attention is back on the clothing creature, along with Mom’s.

  Seeing Mom and Star together, it’s a constant reminder of how different Star and I look from each other. Because I take after Mom—skin brown as acorns, hair black like basil seeds. A figure as curvy as a mountain range. None of those things is bad. We’re not ugly.

  But next to Star, we’re pieces of trash adrift on an aquamarine sea.

  Star’s figure is long and willowy and still curvy. Her skin is the color of wheat, and not a single freckle ruins the marble smoothness of it. Her bone structure is sharp and angled, complete with brown doe eyes and a rosebud mouth that’s perpetually pink. Her hair is light brown enough that she doesn’t look like a motherflipping fool when she bleaches it white blond. Instead, she looks like she belongs on Game of Thrones, with a dragon curled around each shoulder.

  The worst part is, you can’t hate her. No one can. ’Cause her heart’s as sweet as it is covered with Swarovski crystals.

  “The only good thing your father left behind is Star’s looks.” Mom says this all the time, and after she’s done, she’ll look at me and remember to throw a bone. “Oh, and your
eyes, of course.”

  My eyes. Sometimes I wish I could pluck them out and present them to her, like Saint Lucy. That’s the only way I could compete with Star. If I were just my eyes, I mean, disembodied and staring up from a silver platter.

  5. The Story of My River Styx Eyes

  YOU KNOW HOW when Achilles was born, his mom dipped him in the River Styx? To protect him from all harm?

  That’s what happened with me and Star, when we were born. First came Star, pink and small, and then me, big and brown. And Mom dipped Star into some ancient, holy river. One that was big and wide and rushing with bubbling rapids, the color of pale sapphires, smooth stones along its silt edges. Mom sat on one of those stones and dipped Star in the river. Unlike Achilles’s mom, she took care to make sure each of Star’s heels was consecrated. That’s why even Star’s toes and ankles and knees and elbows are beautiful.

  And Mom, for some reason unknown to me, couldn’t love me as much. It was like there was a shallow reservoir of love inside her, and Star took it all. Star drank it all up before I even had a chance. And so when Mom dipped Star in the river, some of the water got in my eyes from Star splashing.

  “That’s enough for you,” Mom must have said, because all the love inside her was already gone.

  And that’s how my eyes became my only source of beauty. It was an accident, one Mom seems to resent from time to time. They are like tiger’s-eye, the stone I mean, all gold and mixed with bronze and little flecks of green. They’re not even that special, but against my dark skin, they stand out enough that Mom begrudgingly will compliment me. Though Mom’s compliments to me are not like the ones she gives Star. Star’s compliments are wide like that river, clear and bottomless. The ones I get are always sharp, like soft tulle wrapped around razor blades.

  “You’re not dressed like a slob today,” she’ll say, or, “Your stomach isn’t as fat in that skirt,” or, “You could be so pretty if you’d keep quiet for five minutes, Moon.” Stuff like that.

  Sometimes I wonder if my face hadn’t been splashed, if Mom would keep me around at all. But then again, who would take photos of Star? Not her, that’s for sure. Not Mom.

  “I’m going on a walk,” I announce.

  “Okay,” Star says. Mom doesn’t even glance up.

  “I’ll try really hard not to fall on the knife of a serial killer, okay?”

  “Mm.” Mom narrows her eyes at a black sweater.

  “I won’t have sex with any trees, either.”

  “Dios.” Now Mom glances at me, crossing herself. “We need to do something about that mouth of yours, Luna.” She holds up a leather jacket. “What about this, Estrella?”

  Dismissed.

  I make my way to the back door.

  The sky is lit just enough that I can go in the Forbidden Woodland a little, thanks to my namesake, the full moon.

  I guess now’s as good a time as any to go over that one.

  6. How Star and I Got Our, to Put It Nicely, Weird Names

  MY DAD WAS born in Mexico, but he’s got all this European ancestry. Had. Had all this European ancestry. His eyes were like sea glass, turquoise almost in their brightness. And his skin was white people’s idea of tan, and his hair was slick and brown, and he even had freckles on the tops of his cheeks every summer. Must be where I get mine from.

  And my mom was born in Texas, but she’s dark like roasted chestnuts, her hair curly and so black, it won’t lighten at the ends no matter how long she grows it. She’s short with wide hips and feet, perfect for baby-making and field-working—that’s what some white guy on the street told her once, right in front of me and Star.

  They agreed to name us Luna and Estrella, proper names, normal names, but something happened when my mom was in labor. My mom was in agony, screaming curse words in Spanish, and one of her nurses hissed, “We speak English in this country.”

  It wasn’t the first time Mom had heard that—I’m sure of it. But something about being in the middle of having two babies, something about her body about to be split open like an overripe mango, it was like she’d decided that was the last time.

  “No,” she said when my father started filling out our birth certificates. “They’ll be Star and Moon.”

  My dad didn’t think Star and Moon were as pretty as Estrella and Luna, because, honestly, they’re not. But I guess he knew better than to argue with a woman who’d just pushed out twins, so he filled out our names as she asked.

  Star Celestina, after her. Moon Willow, after him.

  “I knew you’d be a star,” Mom tells Star all the time. “That’s why I named you that.”

  This doesn’t hurt as much as the other stuff, because once, while camping, I was up with my dad watching the moon rise. And he took me in his arms and said, “Look at that moon. Have you ever seen a prettier moon?” And I hadn’t, because that moon was full and gold like an ancient coin, glowing with a smattering of fog-like clouds around it. But then Daddy said, “I have! I have!” And he lifted me in the air and told me I was the most beautiful Moon he’d ever seen, and that’s why he named me Moon, because he hoped I’d always see the moon and know my worth and place in the world.

  This is a story I keep written on an old scroll, rolled up, sealed with red wax, locked in a little trunk in my heart. Sometimes, when Mom gets really bad, I hide in my room and imagine it again, what it was like to be loved, to be tossed up into the night sky as high as that gold coin moon but knowing someone would be there to catch me.

  It’s a nice feeling. I’m glad I got to know it.

  7. All That Spooky Old-Religion Stuff

  I TAKE A breath and close my eyes, smelling the pine and moss and dirt. Though I can’t see them all, flowers open all around me. Crocuses and dandelions and salvia, sage and lupine and five-petaled wild roses. There’s the white blooms of fruit, too—strawberries, blackberries, raspberries, all wild, their bushes already full of tight green berries. God. I won’t be around to taste them, not this summer. Not till August, and by then the asshole squirrels and birds will’ve cleared them out. Anything left over will taste too much like wine.

  Star owes me a lot of freaking berries.

  After I wander around for a few minutes, this is what I’ve collected in my trunk: Leaves, a few pine cones no larger than my thumb. A piece of thread, shiny and silver, draped on a low branch like a strand of moonlike hair. And before I leave the woods, I glance up and spot the mother lode. A hummingbird vine. When in the heckle did that sprout up? It’s covered in fine, comblike leaves and star-shaped red blooms. Smaller than a pinkie print. I pull tiny clippers from my bag and I snip two dozen blooms.

  I always ask the plant before taking. And I always thank it too. Just like Tía taught me. I don’t care how that sounds. Plants have been here for six zillion years longer than us. That makes them sacred in my book.

  And now comes the fun part. I sit near the edge of the forest, where backyard porch lights still reach, and spread the treasure, ruffling items back and forth. An empty shell husk here, open so delicately, it’s as if a tiny fairy did it with reverence. Pine cones on all four corners. Did you know that pine cones close up when they get wet? Once I spent all day in the forest after a rain, and the cones were boarded up like when Southerners are expecting a hurricane. By the end of the day, they’d all opened up again, slow and in a spiral. That’s when I realized that even the things that fall out of plants, seemingly unconnected to any roots or veins, they too are still alive. How amazing is that? It might be even more amazing than all of matter existing inside a fraction of a period.

  I arrange the thread in a spiral and the red stars in a crescent, open at the top, like a flat, wide bowl. And finally, I light a bunch of tea light candles, all Dollar Store brand. And then I set up my tripod.

  This is why Esperanza calls me wild. She says I’m still doing the old-religion stuff, and that I came by it naturally. Rituals from way back when, before the conquistadors barged in and said, Hey, you heathens, we’re gonna ra
pe and kill you now, mmkay? Before, when our people were free and did their own ceremonies and spoke to their own gods. Because they wanted to, not ’cause they were forced to.

  But I dunno. This isn’t a prayer or anything. It’s not a spell. I’m basically making something beautiful from all the stuff lying around.

  That is a prayer, Tía says.

  I’ve got it. Shit, the exposure’s so long, I couldn’t even breathe near it, but I’ve got it now. I wink at the viewfinder, like it’s my little partner-in-crime, because the photo turned out so perfect. Everything arranged just so, gold under the candlelit glow. It really does look like a prayer.

  Welcome to existence, Empress.

  After I admire the image in the viewfinder, I look around over my shoulders. Looking for what, I’m not sure. Usually when La Raíz comes, it’s when I’m really, really absorbed in my work. But I guess I was too quick for it this time. Thank goodness. The last thing I need today is a cursed miracle.

  8. Maps of Constellations like Cake Sugar

  MY DAD WAS an anthropologist, an archaeologist, and an all-around adventurer. It’s hard to believe my mom was ever okay with a man like that, but supposedly they were happy once.

  Dad would take me and Star camping every other weekend, and once he took us all the way up to Alaska to camp for a whole summer month. I was super into astrology at the time, and Star was such a jerk about it, trying to get me back on the “Christian path.” “Daddy,” she said to him. “Isn’t it ridiculous that some people believe our personalities and futures are in the stars?” She then gave me a long, pointed look.

  “Oh, I don’t know,” Dad responded. We were all sitting by a little campfire, heating up water for hot cocoa, which we’d drink out of Dad’s old tin cups. “For thousands of years, all we had to guide us were constellations. We followed them at sea and on land, letting them guide our whole destinies.” He shrugged and winked at me. “Makes sense that people still look up for answers on the next steps.”