When Stars Burn

Chapter Sixteen: Take Me Home

A/N: Hi everyone! Glad to still see you here. Some people probably find this story too slow but to make Star go from point A to point B, we have to show how she gets there and we have to show that it was no easy feat. After all, it it were, she would've gotten there a long time ago. 

Also, this story has some darker themes. Themes that continue to have divisive opinions on them. I'm writing this from the perspective of someone who had to bear the brunt of the consequences of people's mistakes so if you sense the bitterness, I hope you can see where it's coming from.

Hope you enjoy!

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I'm not a big fan of good intentions.

Seems like they only come up once we've already screwed up or we're at least on our way there. They're like a handy sticker label for something that suddenly needed justification because do we ever really have to justify something that turned out great?

If nothing screwed up, it would just be as it started out—a plan to execute. Ever noticed that?

So when I gave Julian a reluctant yes to drive down with him to LA for Thanksgiving dinner with his parents, I did so with good intentions. I knew that no matter how hard I tried, I was bound to screw up. It's like going on stage to perform a dance I've never rehearsed in my life. I was bound to trip and fall flat on my face.

The extent of my meet-the-parents experience was occasionally hanging out with Ram's mother, Dolores, either at her house or her hair salon. There was no impressing her—she knew exactly what her son's sins were and even thought me too good for him. She was a lovely woman—one with a backbone I often admired. She was probably the only person Ram feared.

The situation with Julian was different.

For one, his family didn't know me well enough. Even Julian didn't know me well enough. What I might yield as an advantage from the perspective of people like Ram and Dolores might not exactly measure high on the scale of people like Julian and his family whose world was still much too unblemished to be tolerant of the slightest flaw.

And I was pretty sure that even if they did know me well enough, they wouldn't see too much they could be impressed with. Whatever I've accomplished for myself had been mostly accomplished with ruthless calculation and self-serving schemes. I certainly never got here by saving baby rabbits and gifting unicorns to starving nations. That would be more like Cammi's style.

Nevertheless, Julian insisted that we would all have a great time and that his parents were excited to meet me.

"When did your brain short-circuit that you thought it would be cute to tell your parents about us?" I muttered grumpily the evening before we drove out, when Julian was trying to gently coax me out of not going.

"I had to explain when I told my Mom that she and Dad couldn't come visit me last month," he said with a long sigh, stretching out on my bed next to the duffel bag I was refusing to pack with an overnight's worth of clothes. "You can't just cut your parents out of your life without an explanation, no matter how temporarily."

Why not? I did exactly that.

Which clearly defined me as the bad child and Julian as the golden one.

"I didn't know they wanted to come and visit you," I said quietly, watching the pensive look on his face as he laid there and stared at the ceiling. "You could've told me and I would've stayed out of your way."

He glanced at me with a raised brow. "The last thing I wanted was to give you another reason to keep your distance. I told them there was a girl. And that I didn't want to scare her away. My mother let me off the hook with the promise that I was going to introduce her to them soon."