Starry Eyed

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Waiting for Star to come back was like waiting for rain in the midst of an endless drought. I sat at the desk in our dormitory while James played some stupid video game on his computer, with the volume up much too high. Every gunshot popped in my ears. And there was a weight in the pit of my stomach that made me feel like I was sinking.

This report I was supposed to be writing about some canoe polo team success for the school paper wasn't going anywhere. Every time any words managed to form themselves, my mind would cuss them out and they'd never reach the paper. All of the stuff I'd written before had been moderately successful, and no trouble to get done. But this one article was starting to seem impossible.

An explosion came from the computer behind me, and a rainbow of radioactive curse words burst across the room. I heard the slamming sound of a laptop closing, and James let out an agonised moan. Surrendering from the pain and boredom I was submitting my blocked-up mind to, I tossed my pen away and sighed to the sound of it clattering into the wall.

"You actually like writing that crap?" James asked, stretching out across his bed with a huff. I brushed my hair out of my eyes and turned to him.

"My fault I signed up," I shrugged. "It's not usually this bad. Most of the time it's fun."

James laughed faintly. "You're such a nerd."

"Said the Ken doll," I retorted, pulling a face. But there was no hatred in our arguing any more. It wasn't a real fight now, and there was no gasoline to fuel the fire. We were teasing and bickering just like friends. I guess I'd already come to the conclusion that this was unavoidable at this point, of course. And Star had stitched us together even more. Star. Suddenly, I remembered myself inside her room, digging for treasure through her sandpit of special things. I winced.

"Where's Star?" Asked James absentmindedly, reading my scattered thoughts. I decided to tell him the truth. He deserved to know just as much as I did, and honestly, I felt a bit guilty for not telling him sooner.

"She, uh... She's being interviewed. By the cops."

"Huh?" James stared in confusion, but I only had to say "fire" for him to understand. His expression changed to something unreadable, his brow furrowed as he thought. I grabbed my laptop from the desk and kickstarted it up.

It was a little while before he spoke, a book in his hands. A rare sight. The cover depicted a silhouette swinging on a tyre strung from a tree; 'To Kill A Mockingbird'. We'd both been assigned the novel for English. He skimmed the pages as he spoke.

"Why do they think Star's a suspect, anyway?" James muttered. "She didn't do anything."

"She had cigarettes." I turned to my computer screen, which was now glowing bright blue with the login screen. "They've got to adress it from all angles."

"It was an accident, anyway."

I raised my eyebrows, considering this answer. I'd wondered for a while what James thought of the matter. To someone who'd once been plastic, whose world used to be an inpentetratable bubble, he was probably a little more naive than your regular person. Did he believe the fire and Harlem's death were coincidental, or did he agree with the conclusions the rest of us had long ago reached? Maybe he didn't even think Harlem had been murdered.

Only one way to find out.

"You reckon it was?" I asked curiously, not daring to turn and look at him.

"Well, yeah. A dropped cigarette. The end. Tons of kids had smokes in that room."

The evidence had always seemed pretty clear to me. After the death toll on the court, things had been relatively obvious. "What about the graffiti, though?"